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Quotes by Psychologist
"Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination."
29
"Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary."
29
"The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible."
29
"I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there."
29
"The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes."
29
"Finally, fighting for gay rights, speaking out in various places and making friends, men and women, was great."
29
"Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys."
29
"Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs - not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can 'be', that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves."
29
"The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them."
29
"In fact, it has been said that when you have sex with someone, you are actually having sex with everyone who ever slept with that individual."
29
"When the toddler does something and there are consequences for his action civilization begins."
29
"Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?"
29
"Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world."
29
"Without sounding pompous, I really do feel that I have a set of standards that I must adhere to, even leaving aside considerations of what the readers expect."
28
"Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human."
28
"Love and work... work and love, that's all there is."
28
"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."
28
"Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?"
28
"There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event."
Fact,
28
"This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man."
28
"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent."
28
"What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it."
28
"There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism."
28
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
28
"The toddler craves independence, but he fears desertion."
28
"People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages."
28
"Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed."
28
"I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available."
28
"The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous."
28
"When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step along the way."
28
"The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective."
28
"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."
28
"Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours."
28
"People are like stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."
28
"Every man wants to feel that his woman would love him apart from anything else."
28
"Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth."
28
"Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category."
28
"We have finally started to notice that there is real curative value in local herbs and remedies. In fact, we are also becoming aware that there are little or no side effects to most natural remedies, and that they are often more effective than Western medicine."
28
"We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to."
28
"I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public."
28
"When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship."
28
"Fifth and finally, do nothing impulsively. Give God an opportunity to speak. Until He does, stall for time and concentrate on the first four approaches."
28
"What you know about the people whom you know at all well is truly amazing, even though you have never formulated it."
28
"Looking after my health today gives me a better hope for tomorrow."
28
"The problem is that for women, the average time is just over 14 minutes... men are left with about 12 minutes during which time they need to think of something to do!"
28
"Forgiveness means letting go of the past."
28
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