Selected psychology quotes

1. 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.

2. Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.

3. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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

5. 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.

6. Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.

7. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

8. What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

9. What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

10. Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

11. 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.

12. 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.

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

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

19. Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

20. 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.

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

22. 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.

23. To be human means to feel inferior.

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

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

26. 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.

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

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

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

30. 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.

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

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

33. Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

34. The secret to humor is surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

41. Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

42. In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

43. Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

44. Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

45. Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

46. Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

47. Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedurfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.

48. I was very fond of them, if only they would have had me.

49. If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

50. Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.

51. The less a man is forced to come into contact with others, the better off he is.

52. There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

53. What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams ... and we search in vain for their original ... Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

54. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.

55. Ich glaube nicht an die Freiheit des Willens. Schopenhauers Wort: >Der Mensch kann wohl tun was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will.< begleitet mich in allen Lebenslagen und versohnt mich mit den Handlungen der Menschen, auch wenn sie mir recht schmerzlich sind. Diese Erkenntnis von der Unfreiheit des Willens schutzt mich davor, mich selbst und die Mitmenschen als handelnde und urteilende Individuen allzu ernst zu nehmen und den guten Humor zu verlieren.

56. We are struck by the psychological force and even fierceness with which he reveals the deepest recesses of the human heart.

57. Egoisten sind wir alle, der eine mehr, der andere weniger. Der eine lasst seinen Egoismus nackend laufen, der andere hangt ihm ein Mantelchen um.

58. What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

59. A man's fate is his own temper.

60. It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

61. 'My idea of an agreeable person,' said Hugo Bohun, 'is a person who agrees with me.'

62. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

63. Your denial is beneath you, and thanks to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I see through you.

64. So, thanks for coming out, I guess. Yeah, it's good to see people, you know. The newsman is so horrifying you get the impression you're just going to walk out your door and immediately be raped by some cracked-addicted, AIDS-infected : pit bull or something.

65. Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

66. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

67. I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

68. 'And I cant believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been'

69. 'Turns out not where, but who you're with, that really matters.'

70. 'I find sometimes it's easy to be myself, sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else.'

71. We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. As this opinion may appear somewhat extraordinary, it may not be improper to confirm it by some other considerations.

72. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

73. The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

74. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit's motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

75. Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

76. The heart of a man is like deep water.

77. 'I have this theory about smart people. If you're smart, you're either the only person in your family who's smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.'

78. If you can control your emotions, chances are you don't have too many.

79. Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.

80. Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.

81. For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. He may have occasional fits of conscience and moral rectitude but otherwise his actions are governed by self-interest. It follows then that whatever the moral reasons for conservation it will only be achieved by the inducement of profit or pleasure.

82. The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined.

83. A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.

84. Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)

85. It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.

86. Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

87. I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.

88. Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

89. He (Hitler) is thinking about the peasant girls. When they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so that you can see their behinds, that's what he likes, especially when they've got big round ones. That's Hitler's sex life. What a man.

90. It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.

91. We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.

92. What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.

93. We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

94. Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

95. Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.

96. I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.

97. L'amour-propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs.

98. Il ne faut pas s'offenser que les autres nous cachent la verite, puisque nous nous la cachons si souvent a nous-memes.

99. Si on juge de l'amour par la plupart de ses effets, il ressemble plus a la haine qu'a l'amitie.

100. On aime mieux dire du mal de soi-meme que de n'en point parler.