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Psychology Quotes
"Your memories are like the air I breathe. I don't have to keep checking on it every now and then to make sure whether I am doing it or not. It happens all by itself. But the moment I try to stop it and hold it back forcefully, I start craving for it more and before I could even know I will be fighting to get more of it so that I could survive."
"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so-but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."
"He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object."
"Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity."
"Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval."
"I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."
"Men who are unhappy like men who sleep badly are always proud of the fact."
"The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors."
"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane."
"But profound as psychology is, it's a knife that cuts both ways (...). I have purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it. Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen."
"Craziness is just a varying degree of sanity."
"I told you from the beginning-as soon as I could-I told you I was afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil spirit-contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came into my mind; and it got worse-all things got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything."
"When used as a tool, fear will enhance your preparedness; when used as a guide, it will stop your progress."
"The more distortions we have the less attention we can pay to realizing our potential and self- actualization of our personality."
"Honesty is vulnerability. Sadly, not everyone can handle someone's honesty. However, lying allows people to be comfortable."
"And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time."
"When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly."
"Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power."
"He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own."
"Currently, you are approaching each opportunity with a single possible outcome and when that doesn't happen you fool yourself that there was nothing more that you could have done."
"Psychology has falsified love as surrender and altruism, while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love. The depersonalized and objective are the worst lovers."
"Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do."
"An attitude is much deeper than just our emotions or the thoughts we think. It's a decision we make based on our core beliefs and values."
"At first you might wonder what you did to deserve such treatment. Nothing, probably, so that doesn't matter. What matters is that, eventually, the abuse becomes the status quo. It's no longer about the whats and whys ("what did I do? "why are they doing this?) but the whens and hows ("when are they going to do it? "how are they going to get me?). Persecution becomes inevitable, inescapable. And once you get into the victim mindset, you're fucked. The bullies don't even need to hurt you now; your poor, warped, pathetic brain is doing half the work for them."
"Once I knew what was bothering me, the greater part of my uneasiness left. Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear."
"The fear of losing anything is the inability to prepare for the best."
"The playboy is not necessarily a man who has many girlfriends, or a man who has many women, or a man who has slept with many women. That is old. But there is a new breed of the playboy and he is the man who remains single in attempts to make every woman feel as if he belongs to her, he remains a virgin in order to make every woman feel like she will be the first one, and in the end he may choose a very unattractive woman to adorn his side, so that in all circumstances, he will shine as the more beautiful one. This is the new breed of playboy. And it is a very evil one."
"Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design."
"A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments."
"He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door."
"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched."
"How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy."
"It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis..."
"Maybe, the lesson we can all learn from the inner sadness of a Narcissist is to see through our own fabrications, our own illusions so that we can be set free to be real once more."
"Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you're not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That's if you ever leave.) I was lucky-I got slung out; they couldn't afford to keep me any longer."
"There are those whose primary ability is to spin wheels of manipulation. It is their second skin and without these spinning wheels, they simply do not know how to function. They are like toys on wheels of manipulation and control. If you remove one of the wheels, they'll never be able to feel secure, be whole."
"Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life."
"There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."
"Fear has the role we give it. We are able to empower or poison ourselves to whatever degree we want. This is the beauty of our design."
"Mankind is not a race of noble savages - but primitive monsters hide inside us, elusive as Sasquatch..."
"Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere - is always right."
"The ego taunts truth with sarcasm."
"A first impression works like a magic mirror; it reflects what intrigues us rather than echoing a truthful picture. A first impression is the creating of an imagined character born from personal desires, perceptions, and biases. Though sparked by an introduction to a real, living, breathing individual, the person remains a mystery long after parting. It is a fictitious ghost masked with similar features that remains. A first impression is rarely accurate; therefore, it should never be trusted."
"He was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes."
"Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?""No."
"In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility."
"The best don't stick around when you treat them poorly, only the desperate do."
"Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections."
"Maybe I hold on for too long, but maybe you don't hold on for long enough?"
"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it."
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