2,269 Psychology Quotes

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

The portions of a woman which appeal to man's depravity Are constructed with considerable care.

Tender-handed stroke a nettle, And it stings you for your pains; Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as silk remains. 'Tis the same with common natures: Use 'em kindly, they rebel; But be rough as nutmeg-graters, And the rogues obey you well.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.

Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.

Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point. The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much hardier stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them. The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

For some unknown reason, bad-boys draw you in despite the fact that they are jerks.

The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.

To be human means to feel inferior.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.

Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.

But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

The secret to humor is surprise.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.

I'll give up my bad habits as soon as equally satisfying good habits become available.

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

Most of my problems have no answer or else the answer is worse than the problem.

I'm in search of myself - have you seen me anywhere?

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.

To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.

Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?

It is difficulties that show what men are.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

Crows pick out the eyes of the dead, when the dead have no longer need of them; but flatterers mar the soul of the living, and her eyes they blind.

Exceed due measure, and the most delightful things become the least delightful.

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.

The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.

It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.

The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.

The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

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.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.

My nature is that I have to excite myself with a big challenge.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.