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Quotes by Psychologist
"While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person."
12
"The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado - masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom - namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety - creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community."
12
"To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern " and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values."
12
"Most loneliness results from insulation rather than isolation. In other words, we are lonely because we insulate ourselves, not because others isolate us."
12
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents."
12
"Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture."
12
"We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality."
12
"I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain."
12
"Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but moving, growing, working together; even when there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized."
12
"Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says."
12
"The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land."
12
"Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain."
12
"If you're going through difficult times today, hold steady. It will change soon. If you are experiencing smooth sailing and easy times now, brace yourself. It will change soon. The only thing you can be certain of is change."
12
"What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the "social character" suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction."
12
"The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity."
12
"Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity - and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful - briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns."
12
"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."
12
"Courage isrequired not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom but in the little hour - to - hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility."
12
"In my clinical experience the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers."
12
"Given these differences between the sexes, the sexual revolution was the biggest joke men ever played on women. By convincing them that the old rules didn't apply and that two could play the predator game, men enticed women to do what men have always wanted women to do. But what a price was paid for the new "freedom. And predictably, women were the ones who got stuck with the bill."
12
"Resist the temptation to see yourself as a victim."
12
"Whatever else you set out to do, begin by getting to know God and seeking His will in your life. If you do that, you will find Him. He will lead you. He will bless you. What a wonderful promise! But it is conditional. If you turn your back on the Lord, He will cast you off forever."
12
"As I indicated in an earlier chapter, it is so important to pause and think through some of these basic issues while you are young, before the pressures of job and family become distracting. Everyone must deal with the eternal questions sooner or later. You will benefit, I think, from doing that work now. As I said earlier, whether you are an atheist, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew, a New Ager, an agnostic, or a Christian, the questions confronting the human family are the same. Only the answers will differ."
12
"The world is filled with so many beautiful people after all and who am I to think that you will hold on, hold on to me, because who am I and what are we?"
12
"A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning."
12
"And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it's only through something broken that something beautiful can grow."
12
"One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
12
"Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task."
12
"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations."
12
"Whenever you begin to conclude, "I can't win," and "What's the use?" you've set yourself up for failure. Your pessimism becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy."
12
"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."
12
"You smoked another cigarette and we shared another coffee and it was just another morning that made me realise that this is all it takes to be happy."
12
"Before you criticize your parents for their failures and mistakes, ask yourself: "Will I really do that much better with my own children? The job is tougher than it looks, and mistakes are inevitable!"
12
"In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us."
12
"So I was a stone in the sea. Gravity gave up on keeping me above the surface. I did not try to swim and so I sank to the bottom with no will to turn back. I'm tired, I told him. I'm done.But he wouldn't let me and he held me up even on his hardest days and he was a lighthouse when all I saw was darkness."
12
"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."
12
"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do."
12
"Every man is a poet at heart."
12
"I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out."
12
"When a man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."
12
"I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I'm coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That's the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment."
12
"Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference,ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being."
12
"It's a journey, it's a fight everyday. There was a real effort to stay in the program... So far this has been a very successful rehab."
12
"The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child."
11
"The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things."
11
"It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour."
11
"One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism."
11
"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it."
11
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