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Psychology Quotes
"Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor."
30
"Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there's nothing there, it's vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can't think nice for too long-it would destroy me."
30
"We came in today with a chip on our shoulder to prove who we are."
29
"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?"
29
"Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back."
29
"Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt."
29
"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."
29
"People with higher ratios of positive to negative emotions are more likely to flourish in life."
29
"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."
29
"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."
28
"Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation."
28
"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']"
28
"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."
28
"I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
28
"Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it."
28
"He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration."
27
"The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture."
27
"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."
27
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
27
"Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins."
27
"Insane people -- psychologically defined, not legally define -- are not in touch with reality."
27
"Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?"
27
"It's the hard things that break; soft things don't break. It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it's the soft things that can't break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!"
27
"Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self."
27
"You have treasured your MIND more than your 'SELF' and that's the primary source of unhappiness!"
27
"On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are."
27
"The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane."
27
"Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration."
26
"The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time."
26
"Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world."
26
"My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?"
26
"Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist."
26
"I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites."
26
"I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness."
26
"Be aware of the type of humor you use in your daily life. Just because people are laughing doesn't mean it is creating positive vibes."
26
"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."
26
"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."
26
"I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists."
25
"There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography."
25
"I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary."
25
"Never to talk of oneself is a form of hypocrisy."
25
"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."
25
"Confirming what you see as reality...is a true sign of your arrogance."
25
"She had only two modes of operation: complete control or complete insanity."
25
"We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes]."
25
"If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive."
25
"The primary symptom of a controller is denial, that is I can't see its symptoms in myself."
25
"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."
25
"Pride is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary."
25
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