Psychology Quotes

“Tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.”
― Nathaniel Branden, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bodies Left Behind

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
― John Berger

“Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation.”
― George K. Simon Jr., In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing With Manipulative People

“Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

“When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”
― Carl Jung

“we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”
― Clifford Geertz

“The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.”
― Wilhelm Reich

“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.”
― Harshit Walia

“Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...”
― Asa Don Brown, The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview

“The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols

“Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”
― C.G. Jung

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Not all friends know they have lost you.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.

I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.”
― Nikola Tesla, Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla

“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language

“It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot