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Quotes About Psychology

We send for him, laddie, we make him come to us. We play him on the home ground.' 'How does that help?' Sean asked. 'It gives us an advantage immediately - it makes him remember that he's the one doing the asking.
~ Wilbur Smith
The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.
~ Wilhelm Dilthey
The author believes that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of the science of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.
~ Will Durant
But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.
~ Will Durant
Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep
~ William Carlos Williams
If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.
~ William Faulkner
Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't. (William Faulkner)
~ William Faulkner
She paints some, Stanley said in a vindicatory tone. -Paints! Did you see the abstract she did for the Army Air Force? the face persisted. -For a psychological test, they used it to pick out the queers, if you were queer the painting didn't look like anything, if you weren't it looked like a snatch.
~ William Gaddis
Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state.
~ William Gibson
I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again, it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.
~ William Golding
The enemy is always in the mind.
~ William Goldman
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
~ William James
But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
~ William James
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
~ William James
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
~ William James
He believes in No-God, and he worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.
~ William James
If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy.
~ William James
I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution.
~ William James
PSYCHOLOGY IS THE Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions.
~ William James
a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
~ William James
Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete.
~ William James
psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means.
~ William James
Everything that's been done to us we carry forever. Most of us do our damnedest to hold on to the good and forget the rest. But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can't or won't touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.
~ William Kent Krueger
Heinrich Himmler is such a mild little fellow when you talk to him, reminding you of a country school-teacher, which he once was—pince-nez and all. Freud, I believe, has told us why the mild little fellows or those with a trace of effeminacy in them, like Hitler, can be so cruel at times. I guess I would prefer my cruelty from great thundering hulks like Göring.
~ William L. Shirer