Psychology Quotes

“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?”
― Margaret Mead

“Many Christians... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness.”
― David Seamands, Healing for Damaged Emotions

“People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?”
― Erich Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender

“I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?”
― Irvin Yalom, سپیده حبیب, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy

“Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.”
― Ken Page

“There's no weakness as great as false strength.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to. The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction, which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future. Healthy practices happen day by day. My patient Maria said to me, “Recovery is like that scene in Harry Potter when Dumbledore walks down a darkened alley lighting lampposts along the way. Only when he gets to the end of the alley and stops to look back does he see the whole alley illuminated, the light of his progress.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.”
― C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore's Dragons

“Your judgments about another person say more about your own character than the character of the person you are pointing a finger at.

This is the key and one of the most fundamental insights about the ‘red flags’ that we often dismiss regarding the people in our lives. If someone complains a lot to you about other people, guess what? That is part of their current character. And, as quickly as the tide changes, you can just as easily become the person they target and criticize, point fingers at, and negatively judge. Forever and always, until vibrations are raised, this will be the cycle of the relationship. So, it’s your choice to continue to engage in the cycle with them, or to move on.

There are plenty of people who do not criticize, point fingers, or judge. THIS is the kind of character we want to foster within ourselves. THIS is the character of the kind of people we DO want to develop close relationships with.”
― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Science is based on faith too!' in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on 'faith', then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, 'The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests' faith can't do the same.' Are you sure you wish to go there, oh faithist? Perhaps, on further reflection, you would prefer to retract this whole business of 'Science is a religion too!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Less Wrong Sequences

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.”
― Thomas M. Sterner

“Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.... I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people's suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.”
― Dorothy Rowe

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.”
― P.D. James, Original Sin

“You cannot connect with anyone except through reality.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“It's not love, to give your wounds to someone else.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
― William James

“You don't think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking.”
― David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships

“Mr. Grace sounded like a very small child, helpless, hopeless. I had made him fuck himself with his own big tool, like one of those weird experiences you read about in the Penthouse Forum. I had taken off his witch doctor's mask and made him human. But I didn't hold it against him. To err is only human, but it's divine to forgive. I believe that sincerely.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“Being in a state of denial is a
universally human response to
situations which threaten to
overwhelm. People who were abused
as children sometimes carry their
denial like precious cargo without a
port of destination. It enabled us to
survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.”
― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Human psychology is that anything you do in a group feels right. People as a group can kill someone and call it religious because it feels right to them. Religion and righteousness are not the same thing. Religion is about going beyond right and wrong and seeing things as they are without any prejudices and judgements.”
― Shunya