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Psychology Quotes
"Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself."
83
"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."
53
"We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. ['Disruption']"
40
"The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'."
31
"Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
30
"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves."
25
"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."
24
"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."
24
"It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work."
23
"One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior."
22
"To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself-his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women-a woman-who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward."
20
"The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture."
20
"There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography."
18
"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."
18
"Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance."
17
"The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter."
17
"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."
15
"Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better."
15
"On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are."
15
"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!"
14
"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."
14
"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."
14
"Our subconscious mind stores all our negative beliefs, complexes and behavioral patterns."
14
"Beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone."
14
"People reject what they do not understand because it makes them feel small. They would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger."
14
"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."
13
"You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can't erase the history that produced them."
13
"My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right."
13
"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'."
13
"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."
13
"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?"
13
"Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins."
13
"Behaviour is a mirror in which every one displays his own image."
13
"If I was your mirror, you would look for me more, than you do me."
13
"You have treasured your MIND more than your 'SELF' and that's the primary source of unhappiness!"
13
"Where there is anger there is always pain underneath."
12
"A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key."
12
"Instead of letting our emotions run amok, we can use our minds as tools to build or create realities that serve us better."
12
"People don't act the way they do because of me. They just act out their own projection of reality, and so do I."
12
"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."
12
"To know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits."
12
"The "Boxes are the walls in your mind."
12
"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."
12
"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."
12
"It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does."
12
"The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis."
11
"Materialism is an identity crisis."
11
"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?"
11
"I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely."
11
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