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Quotes by Psychologist
"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."
39
"Seasons happened and things got colder and harder and suddenly I found myself smoking circles in the airby myself in the snowand I was not okay."
39
"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises."
39
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
39
"Fear may come true that which one is afraid of."
38
"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way."
38
"Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven."
38
"I try not to deal with people's hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did."
38
"I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition."
38
"Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."
38
"There is no coming to consciousness without pain."
38
"By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed."
38
"The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly."
38
"The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek."
38
"But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites, hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind."
38
"Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves."
38
"A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species."
38
"When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic."
38
"When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there."
37
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
37
"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."
37
"Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple."
37
"Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable."
37
"The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation."
37
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."
37
"What's done to children, they will do to society."
36
"I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977."
36
"What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command."
36
"Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others."
36
"So I am not a broken heart. I am not the weight I lost or miles or ran and I am not the way I slept on my doorstep under the bare sky in smell of tears and whiskey because my apartment was empty and if I were to be this empty I wanted something solid to sleep on. Like concrete. I am not this year and I am not your fault.I am muscles building cells, a little every day, because they broke that day,but bones are stronger once they heal and I am smiling to the bus driver and replacing my groceries once a week and I am not sitting for hours in the shower anymore. I am the way a life unfolds and bloom and seasons come and go and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life. I am not your fault."
36
"Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born."
36
"The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them."
36
"What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something-and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?"
36
"Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life."
35
"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."
35
"There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain."
35
"Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder."
35
"Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears."
35
"Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will."
35
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
35
"I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist."
35
"I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself."
35
"Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it."
35
"I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health."
34
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