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Psychology Quotes
"To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation."
42
"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves."
20
"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."
16
"The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture."
16
"Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
16
"Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself."
13
"Our subconscious mind stores all our negative beliefs, complexes and behavioral patterns."
11
"Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young."
10
"As a child, I was afraid of the dark and the monsters on the outside.As a man, I run away from the light, afraid to show the monsters within."
9
"Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable."
8
"She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death!"
8
"On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question."
8
"I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely."
8
"The hated man is the result of his hater's pride rather than his hater's conscience."
8
"I've been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people."
8
"We have negative mental habits that come up over and over again. One of the most significant negative habits we should be aware of is that of constantly allowing our mind to run off into the future. Perhaps we got this from our parents. Carried away by our worries, we're unable to live fully and happily in the present. Deep down, we believe we can't really be happy just yet-that we still have a few more boxes to be checked off before we can really enjoy life. We speculate, dream, strategize, and plan for these "conditions of happiness" we want to have in the future; and we continually chase after that future, even while we sleep. We may have fears about the future because we don't know how it's going to turn out, and these worries and anxieties keep us from enjoying being here now."
8
"Trying to change someone, and their views, is like throwing paper into a fire."
8
"Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance."
7
"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."
7
"The single best machine to measure trust is a human being. We haven't figured out a metric that works better than our own sort of, like, 'There's something fishy about you'."
7
"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
7
"To be filled with fear is to open to the wrong way."
7
"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
7
"Ego and pride is a two headed twist."
7
"By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ['Labyrinth of the mind']"
7
"Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins."
7
"Don't let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them."
7
"If I was your mirror, you would look for me more, than you do me."
7
"Some people feed your ego, but starve your soul."
6
"Where there is anger there is always pain underneath."
6
"Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie."
6
"Materialism is an identity crisis."
6
"The black widow, who had dispatched a lover or two, was sought out for her wisdom. The young spider asked her, "Did you keep his harmful secret under the threat of danger, or did you spin a web so confusing that he didn't know if you were friend or foe? Did you release him from the web and your presence or will you give another the venom in which to finish him?" The black widow was quiet and then said, "All of the above."
6
"Some people live their lives being perpetual victims and finger pointers. To anyone who points a finger at someone else and lays all the blame at their feet instead of taking responsibility for their own behavior, I would say, "I see that finger and you know where you can put it?"
6
"None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food."
6
"This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?"
6
"If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked."
6
"You have treasured your MIND more than your 'SELF' and that's the primary source of unhappiness!"
6
"Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves."
6
"I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists."
5
"You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can't erase the history that produced them."
5
"My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right."
5
"Get out of your own way... What we call 'lack of willpower' is actually just losing an argument with an outdated version of yourself."
5
"There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics?"
5
"No doubt he must very soon realize that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can persuade him to postpone any open acknowledge of the fact, and this, with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent."
5
"Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were."
5
"It is easier to be a mere performer and not to make serious decisions, to live with an assistance of someone else's mind and obey someone else's command when you are a person of victim mentality."
5
"Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry."
5
"Instead of letting our emotions run amok, we can use our minds as tools to build or create realities that serve us better."
5
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