Quotes About Psychology

For within himself, be he clairvoyant and articulate, he will find latent the divisions of the mind of European man, and their opposing impulses.

When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?

Is there a line to be drawn between psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?

The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance. When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.

when love is eclipsed by power, the somber hues of shame darken life

Richard Grunberger points out in The Twelve-Year Reich, the Jew served a necessary psychological function. "Just as primitive man's concept of God supposed the existence of the Devil, so the German's progressive self-deification during the Third Reich depended upon the demonization of the Jew.

Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.

People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similiar to our won, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.

You're wasting your time," he said. "You don't learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.

When we are in the grasp of illusion – or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea – instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.

I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson who said: "If you can determine what a man shall think, you will never have to concern yourself with what he will do. If you can make a man feel inferior, you will never have to compel him to seek an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you can make a man feel justly an outcast, you will never have to order him to the back door. He will go there himself, and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one!

Human infants," writes psychologist Martin Seligman, "begin life more helpless than infants of any other species. In the course of the next decade or two, some acquire a sense of mastery over their surroundings; others acquire a profound sense of helplessness.

Every act of dishonesty has at least two victims the one we think of as the victim, and the perpetrator as well. Each little dishonesty ... makes another little rotten spot somewhere in the perpetrator's psyche.

Some truths were too difficult to accept, so the mind manufactured excuses as a way of denying what it already knew.

Emotional approach and awareness should be used when the emotions are below some manageable level of arousal, say 70%, but distraction and regulation should be applied when they exceed this level and the emotions become unmanageable. In

You deal with it, and you get on with your life. "Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never... I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.

If you have urgent current expenses to cover, then future priorities like college and retirement fall off your radar because they are simply less pressing. Scarcity of attention prevents us from seeing what's really important. The psychology of scarcity engrosses us in only our present needs.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

I got a psychology degree from USC, but music is just my whole life.

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever - stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.