Quotes About Psychology

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind.

Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a form of passive resistance.

The way adults could talk themselves into and out of feeling okay about something always amazed her.

What we cannot admit in ourselves we often find in others. If a person--who speaks of another person whom he hates with a vengeance that seems nearly irrational--can be brought to describe the characteristics which he most dislikes, you will frequently have a picture of his own repressed aspects which are unrecognized to him though obvious to others. -June Singer

God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.

Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.

Robert Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University has

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.

Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.

Psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver found a correlation between optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery.15 Others have studied how attitudes affect recovery and found that this improvement is not a function of a patient's tendency to deny that he was ill.

We tend to overemphasize how a negative outcome will affect us. In reality, people are much more resilient than they realize, and "bad outcomes" often are not nearly as bad as people thought they would be. In short, we can take more risks knowing that our "mistakes" (if that's even what they turn out to be) won't be as negative as we imagine they will be.

As soon as we agree to accept a positive evaluation as reason to feel good about ourselves, however, we open the door for the damaging consequences of perceived failure.

to be positive would be to accept positive statements by others, that is, compliments, but as we've seen, to do so sets us up for negative punishment.

Learning about the way people process information and their emotions is hugely helpful to my work.

Aronson's first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

The holding up against collapse often appears in the shoulders and upper back (Lowen, 1975). Some tensions develops there to resist the tendency to collapse. The collapse in the chest is compensated for with considerable hardness in the chest area, which is one of the structure's telltale signs. A subtle expression of low energy in the eyes and mouth is often seen. Frequently, the jaw is retracted, giving the appearance of being "weak

A psychologist would probably say that, as a kid, I was trying to create a sense of order in a chaotic life, with my dad coming and going and all the reprimands and rows. I didn't have control over that, or over my mother's moods, but I had control over the stuff in my room. Objects couldn't do me any harm. I found them comforting. I talked to them, I behaved as if they had feelings. If something got broken, I'd feel really upset, as if I'd killed something.

We have two abilities that make up our life, one called will and the other understanding. They are distinguishable, but they are created to be one. When they are one, they are called the mind; so they are the human mind and it is there that all the life within us is truly to be found.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions, and flourishes.

When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment.

He who is lucid, understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and masters his acts will never execute a memorable action. Psychology is the hero's tomb.

Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?

The clear-sighted person who understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and dominates his action will never make a memorable gesture. Psychology is the hero's grave.