Quotes About Psychology

The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group.

The society in which we live is the result of our psychological state.

Happy people are poor psychologists.

Most women are frequently labelled "insane" for expressing their misery and failing to act positive. It is form of misogynistic abuse that is also about pushing women towards the doctor's room, the therapists couch, and the chemist.

a man within the breast...

more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.

Rachel shivers with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. How can she think about this sort of thing so glibly? Is that what trauma does to you?

The demons of the Devil don't use your weak weaknesses against you, they use your strong ones. If you're rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you're loyal and faithful, they turn those against you. If you're passionate and emotional, they make you passionate and emotional about your worse fears. Your weak weaknesses are no use to them.... They find the strongest weaknesses you didn't know were yours and use those against you.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten

Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover's insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.

The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?

If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.

Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. We

So, in what ways are you mad?

The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.

A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don't like with simple disparagement

I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states — a code which might help us feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.