Quotes About Psychology

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself.

Creativity reduces instinctual tension, it fuses pleasure with reality, and satisfies the libido.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

The best people are always the worst. They drive everyone mad by being so good at second-guessing everything bad.

It is a well-known psychological fact that those who are ever ready to abuse others cannot bear the slightest touch of criticism from others.

It is a curious psychological fact that the man who seems to be "egotistic" is not suffering from too much ego, but from too little. When the ego is strong and well developed, there is no nagging need to impress others--by money, by rudeness, or by any other show of false strength.

But in terms of "psychological" time, most of us are still living in centuries past, stirred by ancient grudges, controlled by obsolete prejudices, driven by buried fears.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

The most curious offspring of shame is shyness.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it.

Trauma can warp the brain.

Somewhere deep within the tormented man there is a tormented child who feels doomed to torment others!

Character has outlived its day. In ancient, primitive times, when biologically weak man struggled against omnipotent nature, character was useful, beneficial; with hideous labor it shoved the heavy stone of human impotence forward. We learned to praise ourselves, to admire character, to prostrate ourselves before it, make a fetish of it. But today no one has the courage to discredit character, although, psychologically speaking, it is now a throwback, simply reactionary.

Such attachment to past failures has been described by Martin Seligman as "learned helplessness.

The pain associated with the fear of failure is often stronger than the pain of the failure itself

Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better, because how we feel — when we get dumped or we win employee of the month — depends on how we interpret that event.

Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their households. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that a man's honor—which really means his ability to hold his head high among his fellow men—depended on his ability to keep any women associated with him from becoming the objects of other men's sexual fantasies.

Just how many ways it's possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they're still trying to make sense of it.

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.

Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy's flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person's skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone

Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.