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Psychology Quotes
"The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls..."
47
"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."
47
"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."
46
"This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."
46
"The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself."
46
"I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
46
"That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored."
46
"Mad people are very emotionally orientated! They have complex feelings, they're easily upset, but are also easy to please! Most mad people have lonely lives, as nobody understands them. So they become "Lost Souls." They dream a lot. Go within their minds to search - some will turn strange, become dangerous. So a madman is created! His world becomes a mission."
46
"A staggering amount of people blame their lives for their miseries, but little do they know that one's repeated interpretations of one's life create one's constant feelings."
46
"Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration."
45
"Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist."
45
"You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father."
45
"The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud."
45
"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."
45
"If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave."
45
"On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are."
45
"The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable."
45
"A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping."
44
"It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts."
44
"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."
44
"But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points."
44
"If we let the drama of others' lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves."
44
"Reason begets honesty, and honesty, if given its head, begets confidence; so consequently, there is a sort of grand authority in the stances of those who know why they are standing."
44
"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?"
43
"It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over."
43
"You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you.""I know," Benteley agreed. "I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?"
43
"Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back."
43
"The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time."
43
"It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right."
43
"The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door."
43
"Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?"
43
"Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly."
43
"Variability has potential to create confusion."
43
"Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self."
43
"You have treasured your MIND more than your 'SELF' and that's the primary source of unhappiness!"
43
"It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own."
43
"The reason as to why we are attracted to our opposites is because they are our salvation from the burden of being ourselves."
43
"We came in today with a chip on our shoulder to prove who we are."
42
"Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment."
42
"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."
42
"Some secrets are heavy because they aren't yours to tell."
42
"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."
42
"You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself."
42
"I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me."
42
"The mind can be won over if it is kept separate from things that appeal to it."
42
"Fear is an illusionary place we travel to in our minds when we allow ourselves to move away from the heart."
42
"Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity."
42
"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."
41
"Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine."
41
"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."
41
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