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Psychology Quotes
"It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament."
2
"What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats."
2
"The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation."
2
"Sometimes you think you're helping someone up, but they're actually pulling you down. This is the painful dynamic of dealing with someone who is incurably selfish."
2
"The primary symptom of a controller is denial, that is I can't see its symptoms in myself."
2
"I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting."
2
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
2
"That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast."
2
"Continuously rambling thoughts disrupt the potential for positive thinking."
2
"His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith's work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over."
2
"Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order."
2
"All problems are illusions of the mind."
2
"His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out."
2
"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."
2
"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."
2
"The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual."
2
"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?"
2
"There are questions that you don't ask because you're afraid of the answers to them."
2
"Don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ..."
2
"Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?"
2
"While it is easy to get caught up in the beliefs and attitudes of others, it is easier still to make one's self a victim of circumstance. Victims of circumstance believe they have no power over their lives, since they are merely the play-things of fate. Since they believe this, it is therefore so."
2
"For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain."
2
"A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope."
2
"Hungry people are always thinking about food, poor people are always thinking about wealth. Obsessive thinking can kill your dreams!"
2
"But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things."
2
"It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery."
2
"Sometimes we are very convinced that what we went through needs to be re-lived so we end up going back and forth to the demons of the past and eventually we fail to get over them."
2
"The doctors agreed: He was going crazy...they didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon."
2
"From spending ten years in hell and coming to this regime of kindness was a shock. It was so much of a shock, it was unbelievable. I was like an untamed animal, I couldn't accept it and I just wouldn't accept it."
2
"I have a copy of you in my brain, when you make me angry I do very bad things to you."
2
"Psychological imprisonment was no less uncomfortable than its physical counterpart. In some ways, it was even worse; it provided the illusion of physical freedom, but garnered none of the benefits of it."
2
"He was mad and plenty brave."
2
"Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder."
2
"She's very selfish. Not exactly self-centered, but totally indifferent to everyone and everything. Don't you agree?' 'I don't think that's possible,' said Mr Satterthwaite, slowly. 'I mean everyone's interest must go somewhere."
2
"Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished."
2
"Psychology is action not thinking about oneself."
2
"Pride,' observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, '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."
2
"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."
2
"I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me."
2
"If we let the drama of others' lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves."
2
"The mind can be won over if it is kept separate from things that appeal to it."
2
"Beliefs will nourish or poison depending on their compatibility with reality."
2
"Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects."
2
"I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."
2
"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."
2
"Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality."
2
"You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you're doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out-now that's the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that?"
2
"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."
2
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