Psychology Quotes

“When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”
― Erich Fromm

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow

“We're always contradicting ourselves.
We want people to tell us apart....
...yet we don't want them to be able to.
We want people to get to know us...
...but we also want them to keep their distance.
We've always longed for someone to accept us...
But we never believed there'd be anyone who would accept our twisted ways.
That's why we'll stay locked up tight...
...in our own little private world...
...and throw away the key, so that no one can ever hurt us.”
― Bisco Hatori, Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 9

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.”
― Socrates

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
― Carl G. Jung

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Psychotherapy East and West

“BEFRIENDING THE BODY

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies.

The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England”
― C.G. Jung

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.”
― Susan Pease Banitt

“Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls

“If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride”
― Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization

“Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
― Carl R. Rogers

“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
― Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.”
― Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life