top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Psychologist
"Fear may come true that which one is afraid of."
19
"When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there."
19
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
19
"The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture."
19
"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality."
19
"Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."
19
"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."
19
"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."
18
"The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity."
18
"What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command."
18
"The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard."
18
"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
17
"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."
17
"We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives."
17
"There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography."
17
"The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance."
17
"To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable."
17
"Love and work... work and love, that's all there is."
16
"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."
16
"The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt."
16
"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."
16
"Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery."
16
"Love... Force it and it disappears. You cannot will love, nor even control it. You can only guide its expression. It comes or it goes according to those qualities in life that invite it or deny its presence."
16
"A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own 'accuracy.'"
16
"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."
16
"Actually, I can't imagine anything more tedious than a perfect person, especially if it was someone who also demanded perfection from me."
16
"Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth."
16
"Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves."
16
"What's done to children, they will do to society."
15
"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."
15
"Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves."
15
"Most of us actually stifle enough good impulses during the course of a day to change the current of our lives."
15
"The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare."
15
"It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them."
May,
15
"The fundamental job of a toddler is to rule the universe."
15
bottom of page