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Quotes by Psychologist
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
28
"Man absolutely cannot live by himself."
28
"I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health."
27
"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."
27
"In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am."
27
"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."
27
"Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others."
27
"Why I write music? Because it hurts not to."
27
"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown."
27
"Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness."
27
"There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon."
26
"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."
26
"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."
26
"I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent."
26
"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."
26
"Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."
26
"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors."
26
"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."
26
"What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance."
26
"Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves."
26
"It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts."
25
"Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies."
25
"Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment."
25
"Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride."
25
"The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard."
25
"What's done to children, they will do to society."
24
"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."
24
"You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside."
24
"Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy."
24
"Depression is the inability to construct a future."
24
"Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will."
24
"The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers."
Man,
24
"What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command."
24
"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."
24
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."
24
"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."
24
"Giving is the highest expression of potency."
24
"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?"
24
"So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?"
24
"Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account."
24
"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."
23
"One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults."
23
"As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal."
23
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