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Psychology Quotes
"When you're scared to death to lose her, know it for sure, you will."
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"Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes."
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"The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself."
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"If I keep myself busy I don't know how lonely I am. I only know how busy I am."
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"I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind."
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"The sight of a child will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons - longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona."
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"Those suffering from terminal falsehood seek out each other, like a drunk seeks out a wall so that he doesn't fall down."
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"I let myself be sad. I let myself think of him."
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"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."
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"I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign."
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"Once, when I was little, I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren't sad?Because it was nobody's business if I was."
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"We feel secure with things we can see or touch."
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"She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows."
9
"She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly."
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"You're human. You can't be a "motivational speaker every damn day of your life. It's okay to have dark days. Allow yourself to go there, then come back up with a gusto, like you always do. You're an angel, but you're also human. Don't beat yourself up for being authentic."
9
"You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing."
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"Self-esteem isn't everything it's just that there's nothing without it."
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"In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them."
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"Guilt is a feeling that you owe a debt that you're not paying."
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"You think too much.''I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown."
9
"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."
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"I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets."
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"Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."
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"A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope."
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"In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten."
9
"Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself - these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation."
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"You said just now, "Don't be so ashamed of yourself, because that's the root of your trouble"""with those words, you seem to have reached right into my innermost soul. What I mean is, when I visit people, I always feel that I'm really the lowest of the low, that everybody takes me for a buffoon, so I say to myself, why shouldn't I act the fool, I'm not afraid of what any of you might think, because every single one of you is even worse than me. That's why I'm a buffoon, I'm a buffoon born of shame, great starets, of shame. It's anxiety pure and simple that makes me so unruly."
9
"It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires."
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"I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper."
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"I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror."
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"Invisibility can be good as a superpower. But psychiatry reveals people don't like it very much."
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"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."
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"Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle."
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"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."
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"It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem."
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"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."
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"Beliefs will nourish or poison depending on their compatibility with reality."
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"But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves."
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"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."
9
"Get out of your own way... What we call 'lack of willpower' is actually just losing an argument with an outdated version of yourself."
8
"Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes."
8
"Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed."
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"The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry."
8
"Our emotions hold more power over us than blade or poison alike. To embrace freely the entire spectrum of our emotions is to allow a multitude of Trojan horses containing hidden emotional poisons to circumvent the walls of rationalization " walls we need to protect our trust, confidence, understanding, and self-control."
8
"We have been trained to feel shame and guilt basically as a means to cause fear and hesitation, to control behavior, or to oppress real freedom and joy. The origins of that are communal fear, jealousy and the desire for power over others. Consequently, many people have the addiction of using shame or guilt simply to avoid possibilities in life, and have, at the same time, a reason to avoid them-if you act spontaneously or feel joy, the result will eventually bring suffering, so you had better watch out, and don't ever forget the past shame and guilt."
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"Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations."
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"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears."
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"The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder."
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"There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads-they couldn't be fair if they tried."
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