Quotes About Psychology

Psychologists and psychiatrists point out that when thoughts are conveyed to your subconscious mind, impressions are made in the brain cells.

ideas could be conveyed to the subconscious mind by repetition, faith and expectancy.

There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.

One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

I will be the clinician of my own pathology.

Joyce Carol Oates

That is a blessing of bad dreams, they are quickly forgotten.

The man is too narcissistic, too shallow and cowardly for suicide. Days

Why is the misery of a child so hilarious to other children?

Sometimes I actually have a phobia of feeling good.

In real life, as I mentioned in the first chapter, people don't try to have feelings, and frequently they try not to have them.

this two-way hatred. I don't understand it. I wonder how much of it is caused by fear?

Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankel.

some of Plato's most famous passages about the divided soul he represents the parts of the soul other than reason as non-human animals.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

I prefer to hide unsettling things and let them build into life-scarring neuroses.

One of the marvels of human psychology is that the people who are thoroughly pessimistic about humankind want to solve our problems by trusting their solution to a very small number of small minds.

There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According

I don't care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.

Perhaps, after all, the greatest psychologist is not the metaphysician but the novelist.