Quotes About Psychology

Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.

Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.

Love is a grave mental illness.

Love is a severe mental disorder.

Basically, every character I've ever played, I've based entirely on internal conflict. And I love doing that, because I think it's very human.

A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.

I love the fact that I can mess with someone's head.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.

I've always heard that women secretly want their father. So I used to walk around in a 1950s business suit, with a hat and a pipe. My opening line would be, 'You should be getting to bed now.'

Psychologically, it is important to understand that the simple fact of being interviewed and investigated has a coercive influence. As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become paralyzed by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did. In a country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and insecurity grow.

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences. For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you'd like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.

No tree can grow to Heaven," adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, "unless its roots reach down to Hell.

People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain?

people organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.

I'm not a fan of Positive Psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this. This matters, because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four.

read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,

I have learned to pay attention to dreams, not least because of my training as a clinical psychologist. Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.

No tree can grow to Heaven," adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, "unless its roots reach down to Hell."134