Quotes About Psychology

As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life.

From childish fear springs the desire to externalise the ego.

The essence of nice people is that they hate life as manifested in tendencies to co-operation, in the boisterousness of children, and above all in sex, with the thought of which they are obsessed. In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.

A word is used correctly when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of correctness. The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.

Human nature is still, to a very great extent, regarded irrationally because it is pleasant to regard people as objects of praise and blame.

The old primitive passions, which civilization has denied, surge up all the stronger for repression. In a moment imagination and instinct travel back through the centuries, and the wild man of the woods emerges from the mental prison in which he has been confined. This is the deeper part of the psychology of the war fever.

the fact that the actual inequalities of power exceed what is made necessary by technical causes, can only be explained in terms of individual psychology and physiology.

The innovations we need at our systems level require an understanding of business, psychology, and policy, but doing it with a deep, deep understanding of how our decisions create barriers for fairness and opportunity for some people.

Narcissism is the result of longstanding behavioral patterns that reflect fixed brain functioning. It requires a lot of motivation to change these patterns.

Research shows that making eye contact is a powerful draw for guys - even in photos. Just don't mistake duck face for flirty.

When I did 'The Cell' - no matter what you think of that movie, because I have my opinions of it too - it was, you know, I still have nightmares from the research that I did. Not from playing the part, just from the research.

Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.

I don't watch horror films, because I don't want those images in my psyche, and I resent having them forced on me before a movie of my choosing.

When you give people something for nothing for awhile and then try to sell them some of that same thing, consciously or not, they resent it.

The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

What I have always loved about modelling is the chance to play a part. I am quite shy naturally, but I like getting into somebody else's head space, understanding how people work and the psychology behind their actions.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

In fact, most people who are bullies are people who have been abused in one way or the other in some other part of their life, and somebody who is bullied at school might come home and bully their younger siblings or their cousins or other people in their neighborhood, or in cyberspace.

Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.

If we are completely honest with ourselves, everyone has a dark side to their personalities.

I never even think of the mental side of things because I never had any issues.