Quotes About Psychology

It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. (...) People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why people take drugs? Not a mystery. It's why they don't take them all the time that's the mystery. Why do people suffer from anxiety? That's not a mystery. How is it that people can ever by calm? That's the mystery. We're breakable and mortal.

And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.

A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.) Then at least you have the honest opinion of at least one person. That's not so easy to get. That's not nothing. That's key to the psychotherapeutic process: two people tell each other the truth—and both listen.

Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas.

Happy" is by no means synonymous with "good.

Na verdade, ficamos mais negativos após uma perda de determinado tamanho do que nos sentimos bem com um ganho de tamanho idêntico. A dor é mais potente do que o prazer, e a ansiedade mais forte do que a esperança.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned. (People often get basic psychological questions backwards. Why do people take drugs? Not a mystery. It's why they don't take them all the time that's the mystery.

Jordan B. Peterson

The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation.

Children hit first because aggression is innate, although more dominant in some individuals and less in others, and, second, because aggression facilitates desire. It's foolish to assume that such behaviour must be learned. A snake does not have to be taught to strike.

Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works very well.

or (this one is particularly evil) "to ensure that it is always my unloved child's fault." These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud's compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called "life-lies."149

Now, strict logicians regard self-deception as an impossibility. They cannot understand how it is possible for a person to believe one thing and its opposite simultaneously. Logicians are not psychologists,

Jordan B. Peterson

No tree can grow to Heaven," adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, "unless its roots reach down to Hell."134 Such a statement should give everyone who encounters it pause. There was no possibility for movement upward, in that great psychiatrist's deeply considered opinion, without a corresponding move down. It is for this reason that enlightenment is so rare.

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.

But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you're not only a body. You're a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being.

Las personas que viven bajo el mismo código se predicen mutuamente. Actúan de tal forma que reproducen los deseos y expectativas de los demás. Pueden cooperar. Pueden incluso competir de forma pacífica, porque todos saben a qué atenerse. Un sistema de creencias compartidas, en parte psicológico y en parte representado, lo simplifica todo, a los ojos de esas mismas personas y de las demás.

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It

Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson

Two-year-olds, statistically speaking, are the most violent of people.

Psychological forces are never unidimensional in their value, however, and the truly appalling potential of anger and aggression to produce cruelty and mayhem is balanced by the ability of those primordial forces to push back against oppression,

Jordan B. Peterson