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. On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant.

42. L'amour ressemblait fort a une torture ou a une operation chirurgicale.

43. Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Ave Atque Value' (1871), stanza III, Fortnightly Review (January 1868; later published in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878)

44. He that is conscious of guilt cannot bear the innocence of others: So they will try to reduce all others to their own level.

45. Well, we're our own prisons. We're each our own wardens and we do our own times. We get stuck in our own little trips and we kind a judge ourselves the way we do. You know, I can't judge uh, nobody else, best thing I can do is try to judge myself and live with that. See, what other people do is not really my affair, unless they approach me with it, and want me to do something about it, uh, then I'll uh take into consideration what has to be done. But other than that I just uh, try to do my number, and do my time.

46. Note for the record. In the all that was said about me, it was not me saying it, and if you see a false prophet, it is only a reflection of your judgments, for in truth, it is motions, not words, that speak for the Manson family. We each have our own worlds and judgments. I have no judgments outside of what you all have set for yourselves. I'm content wherever I am. Whatever you do or say does not touch my inner circle. I have peace within myself. Peace of mind.

47. It's all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom.

48. Dead in your mind or dead in my mind?

49. My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So...know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.

50. My relationship to music is completely subliminal, it just flows through me.

51. Everything's different. You have to recognise the fact that I'm different. Time goes on, and you change. I'm coming into this as a different guy, that's probably the biggest thing.

52. God will send you a double date with the perfect couple. Have you ever made the mistake of going on a double date with the perfect couple? You're in the middle of your bullshit relationship and you actually sit down with two people that are actually in love. You can't even eat your food cause you can't believe what the fuck you are witnessing. You got a fork in your hand like, 'Oh shit! He's really listening to what she's got to say! Wow! They really like being around each other! Man, we can't hang with them no more, they gonna break us up. Can't let these happy motherfuckers fuck up my life!'

53. I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night - as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.

54. 'Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell, whereas spirituality is for people like me who have been there.'

55. We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then, we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti's major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or to put it differently it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening, when we are engaged in the activity of thinking.

56. He's a hollow man. He believes in anything. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty.

57. Racism is always a symptom of a small mind. It is born from man's inability to raise himself from the realm of animals and consciously refuse the temptations of the instinctive impulses of our reptilian brains. The very nature of racism is a failure of humanity - a failure to see through the trickery used by mother nature to fool us into protecting ourselves. We should have, by now, each of us, ascended beyond any need or want for such atavistic, preliterate concerns. However, as sad and disappointing as it may be, so many continue to fail in their growth as spirit.

58. Besides, God isn't dead / He's in your head / Right where he ought to be.

59. You have never, I think, known real Grief-panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, we've all known for most of our lives-you and me particularly. I'm not sure you know human love in the way I do. You have faith and mysticism-intense inner interests-a diverting, virile mind-gusto for vengeance and destruction if necessary, a fancy-a gospel. What you can't imagine is a creature with a certain iridescent aura and nothing within but a beating frightened heart built round and for Duff. . . For two days I am quite alone-in these empty rooms with one thought one prayer-'let it end now'-an absurd feminine desire to die in the same way exactly as Duff. [ I have now a ] fearlessness of death-so let it come now before custom of living disinclines me for dying.

60. It has always been my temptation to put myself in other people's shoes: even into a horse's shoes as he strains before the heavy dray; into a ballerina's points as she feels age weigh upon her spring; into Cinderella's slippers as she danced till midnight; into the jackboot that kicks; into the Tommy's boots that tramp; into the magic seven-leaguers. With experience of age I have learned to control this habit of sympathy which deforms truth.

61. You find something agreeable in almost everyone. I am put off by anything not wholly agreeable. ~ Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Cooper.

62. He is thinner, taller, younger - more boyish-looking - than expected, but he is also the shyest and most nervous human being I have ever seen. He chews not merely his nails but his fingers, twitches his pouty mouth and chin, chain-smokes, wiggles his nose in constant adjustment of his spectacles, looks querulous one moment and ready to cry the next. His hands tremble, he stutters, his whole frame wobbles when he shakes hands:There is no betrayal of the thoughts behind those frightened, very intelligent eyes.

63. There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

64. I have a grand - I wouldn't call my grandmother domineering, no, but this novel is about the way that family traits echo and reverberate through generations and often skip generations.

65. Trust your hunches... Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Warning! Do not confuse your hunches with wishful thinking. This is the road to disaster.

66. You take it easy, Bill Goldberg. You take it easy, I tell you what... The Rock knows that you're nervous about this Sunday at Backlash, okay The Rock don't blame you! Cause you know The Rock is just gonna slap the taste outta your mouth this Sunday at Backlash, Bill Goldberg, you know that right? You know that, ol' gigglepanties, don't look at The Rock like that!

67. The Rock: '(to the Dudleyz) Who are you two roody poos?'

68. Do you smell it, Jabroni?

69. 'Death Before Dishonour' I always used to wonder 'Hey, exactly how much dishonour are we talking about here?' 'Cause I could handle quite a lot. I would, for instance, fellate a Smurf before I picked death. I'd cook him a little Smurf omelette as I was doing it, you know, I'd be perfectly happy doing that. Seasoning it with thyme, you know, listening to his happy satisfied Smurf lip smacks. But every man thinks about Smurfs. They don't say it, but they do. That's why I'm here, to be honest. Just once, you know, what would it be like? Nobody needs to know, you go away for the weekend. Just once, to have the blue salty bulb lolling on your tongue ... if I don't say it, nobody else will.'

70. And they say that after people make love there's a kind of melancholia that descends; la petite mort, you know, the little death. Well, I'm here to tell you, after a romantic night in with yourself, there's a very acute sensation of failed suicide.

71. Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams - Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.

72. 'I'm not nuts. If I'm nuts, I've been nuts my whole life.'

73. If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

74. Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

75. I don't believe in ghosts but they have been chasing me my whole life.

76. He was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom.

77. You may think, passer-by, that Fate Is a pit-fall outside of yourself, Around which you may walk by the use of foresight And wisdom.

78. Her poetry is the diary or autobiography - though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth - of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute.

79. Thou shalt not blame or flatter any. (6)

80. True instruction is this: -to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does. And how does it come to pass? As the Disposer has disposed it. Now He has disposed that there should be summer and winter, and plenty and dearth, and vice and virtue, and all such opposites, for the harmony of the whole. (26)

81. Have this thought ever present with thee, when thou losest any outward thing, what thou gainest in its stead; and if this be the more precious, say not, I have suffered loss. (27)

82. To you, all you have seems small: to me, all I have seems great. Your desire is insatiable, mine is satisfied. See children thrusting their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out again, and then they fall to tears.-'Let go a few of them, and then you can draw out the rest!'-You, too, let your desire go! covet not many things, and you will obtain (95)

83. Freedom is the name of virtue: Slavery, of vice:. None is a slave whose acts are free.

84. The anger of an ape-the threat of a flatterer:-these deserve equal regard.

85. Pride is a sense of worth derived from something that is not organically part of us, while self-esteem derives from the potentialities and achievements of the self. We are proud when we identify ourselves with an imaginary self, a leader, a holy cause, a collective body or possessions. There is fear and intolerance in pride; it is sensitive and uncompromising. The less promise and potency in the self, the more imperative is the need for pride. The core of pride is self-rejection. It is true that when pride releases energies and serves as a spur to achievement, it can lead to a reconciliation with the self and the attainment of genuine self-esteem.

86. The attitude of the intellectual community toward America is shaped not by the creative few but by the many who for one reason or another cannot transmute their dissatisfaction into a creative impulse, and cannot acquire a sense of uniqueness and of growth by developing and expressing their capacities and talents. There is nothing in contemporary America that can cure or alleviate their chronic frustration. They want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action. Even if we should banish poverty from the land, lift up the Negro to true equality, withdraw from Vietnam, and give half of the national income as foreign aid, they will still see America as an air-conditioned nightmare unfit for them to live in.

87. It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In maintaining ourselves against all comers, we are maintaining something that is unknown, uncertain, and never wholly provable. We need a chorus of consent, and we are engaged in an unceasing proselytizing campaign in our own behalf.

88. We almost always have something to prove when we act heroically. We prove to ourselves and others that we are not what we and others thought we were. Our real self is petty, greedy, cowardly, dishonest and stewing in malice. And now in defying death and spitting in its eye we grasp at the chance of a grand refutation.

89. By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts - but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.

90. By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of 'order.' The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

91. I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.

92. We have seen that Kaltenbrunner's right to practice law was revoked on account of his political activity. He was arrested several times and spent four months in an internment camp. Though such punishments were extraordinarily mild in comparison to those which Kaltenbrunner would mete out when his day arrived, they fed his hatred for the System.

93. Rommel was jumpy, wanted to do everything at once, then lost interest. Rommel was my superior in command in Normandy. I cannot say Rommel wasn't a good general. When successful, he was good; during reverses, he became depressed.

94. Nil terribile nisi ipse timor.

95. So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they become secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased, when things go backward.

96. Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme.

97. He is a truly complex fellow, not unlike the Michelangelos and da Vincis of the Renaissance period. He's a supreme artist but he is constantly filled with doubts and self-anger about his work--and that is what makes him so good. He is a perfectionist who is never sure he is attaining perfection.

98. The power of changing oneself lies not in the mind, but in the body and the feelings. Unfortunately, however, our body and our feelings are so constituted that they don't care a jot about anything so long as they are happy. They live for the moment and their memory is short. The mind alone lives for tomorrow. Each has its own merits. The merit of the mind is that it looks ahead. But it is only the other two that can 'do.'

99. He was less concerned about the position's evaluation than about the character of the arising struggle. If he liked the character of the battle, he felt absolutely at home and, as a rule, didn't fail to outplay his opponents.

100. Concerning the body, there are at least as many, if not more, imaginary sick as really sick people. Concerning the mind, there are as many, if not more, imaginary sane people as really sane ones.