Quotes About Psychology

What's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I'm going to get.

As soon as you try to eliminate a thought or emotion, you make it stronger.

I do tend to find when you're playing characters, often - just for the time you're playing them - there are sides of your personality that get stronger because you draw on them more.

I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

Particularly with middle-class people, self-absorption is a struggle.

For a long time, I've struggled very, very much with what people call treatment-resistant depression.

I enjoy playing characters who are struggling, particularly with themselves.

Man, anytime the ball goes through the basket. It doesn't matter if it's a jumper or a drive. Any time the ball goes through the basket, and it's going through consistently, it's demoralizing for any opponent.

I didn't want my opponent to know there was anything wrong with me.

The more irrational you make your opponent, the more control you have over him in the ring.

I always fight better when my opponent's angry.

You build up the opponent, and you lose confidence.

You've got to try to find some type of mental edge on your opponent.

Look, most players can't stand to be outplayed by an opponent's bluff. Quite honestly, though, it doesn't bother me that much.

As a fighter my goal is not to get hit and frustrate my opponent. Once I get you frustrated then I got you.

Yeah, I'm going to start talking to myself a little bit. Not talking to the opponent as much.

I cannot let my opponents get into my head.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.

When you are living a character, the emotional graph comes pretty organically.