Best 3064 quotes in «psychology quotes» category

When you go into the psych ward, you can’t have anything with you except colored pencils. You can’t have any electronics. If you have a drawstring on your pants, a belt, shoelaces, a hood, or extra-long fabric, your very clothes are ripped off your back. They search you with a metal detector like you’re a criminal, doing everything short of putting their hand up your butt. Before you go through those cold, automatic, barred doors, you know your life is not your own. This is especially true during the first week, while you stare at florescent lighting and wait impatiently for your meds to kick in. I wish I had remembered the psych ward prison cell a week ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be wearing this hospital gown that they gave me until I can get more compliant clothes.

When you have mental illness it's common to be shunned by your family or friends it wouldn't happen if they knew the pain you were in.

When you hear “Neuroscience” you would probably be thinking about the study of the nervous system. And that’s exactly how the field began its journey into scientific investigation. But I wanted to do something with it, which no other scientist or philosopher had done before. I began moulding the soft clay of Neuroscience with the ingredients of my own philosophy to prepare the actual science of self-realization.

When you hold onto anger it eats at your soul. Anger never changes someone elses heart, but it will change yours.

When you have experienced what oxygen starvation and biological deficiencies can do to mental processes, you have sampled what happens during the final stages of death in the human.

When you just have a torch and horror around you... then turn off the torch.

When you lack self-esteem it’s easy to keep attracting the wrong people into your life.

When you love someone you have chosen to relinquish a part of yourself in order to inherit a part of them, and what perpetuates that love is the feeling of confident appreciation for such a potentially debilitating trade. That's why heartbreak feels like a sudden void.

When you recover from Narcissistic abuse, look for courage in your heart. You can rebuild as long as you never surrender.

When you’re a kid, you don’t think about big stuff that could change your life. You think about small things that might terrify you –like a bad report card or missing a goal in front of all your friends or your friends no longer wanting to play with you. Because that's the biggest stuff you know. The biggest disappointments are all tied to this small little universe of yours, because bigger things cannot fit into a small universe. If you wanted bigger things in there you needed to have more room –or make more room. Perhaps you thought about your parents or your pets dying, which was rare. But all you knew was you would be terribly sad and lonely. And on those occasions when people or pets actually died, someone usually came along and distracted you from feeling too much of your actual feelings. Grownups did that –they never left you alone to feel alone or think alone too much. They tended to think you are too small to know how to think and feel in big heaps, so they took parts of your heap onto themselves. To help – but in the long run –it doesn’t help at all. Because if you do not see, or feel or think, or taste the bitter things in life, you don’t know they exist. You have not seen enough of the world to know how terrible it could be. And unfortunately for Sam, this inability to process change persisted into adulthood.

When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.

When your only competition is becoming a better you, you will always win the game.

When you struggle with fear and trust issues, be aware that you may not trust yourself. You are the first person you must learn to trust.

When you think it’s there it will be there. When you think it’s not there still it will be there. It is like a mirror which needs another mirror to see it. It is mind.

When you’ve had a psychotic breakdown it’s always so difficult making that decision. You meet someone new and you wonder how much you should tell them? You wonder what that person’s threshold of ‘strange’ is, and at what point in my story would I end up driving them away. That fear it’s always there in the back of your mind. Those details you never really even admitted to yourself, but that somehow have to be told just as much as they have to be buried deep down.

Whereas in its developments up to the present psychology has dealt chiefly with psychic processes in the light of physical causation, the future task of psychology will be the investigation of their spiritual determinants. But the natural history of the mind is no further advanced today than was natural science in the thirteenth century. We have only begun to take scientific note of our spiritual experiences.

Where psychology fails is in trying to give plausibility and coherence to actions that have none.

Wherever problem persist, wisdom is lacking. There is no problem anywhere except wisdom problem. Wisdom provides solutions where there is complications.

Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them - fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systemically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices.

Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

Where were Christians before Freud? Up a tree? Were the bereft of all crucial knowledge about man's relationship to God and his neighbor? Was the church's counseling a hopeless, primitive, stone-age activity that should have disappeared with flint knives? Were Christians shut up to sinful, harmful living before the advent of psychotherapy? Did God withhold truth for living until our present age?

Where would we be without our painful childhoods?

Whether you're angel or demon I'm in love.

While many explorers like to endure hardship by traveling to remote inhospitable parts of the world, I prefer to explore from the comfort of my own home.

While in "filling in", the brain fills in the gaps in perception, in "change blindness" on the other hand, the brain cancels out unnecessary environmental information from our perception. For example, when the viewers at a basketball match are focused on the movement of the player with the ball, they turn blind towards any changes or event that may be occurring in the background. Even if a gorilla passes the basketball court, the viewers won’t notice it (and I mean this literally) because their brain cancels out that information in order to focus on the ball (pun absolutely intended).

While [female genital mutilation] may have not originated with Islam, it has become an integral part of the religious practice in many regions tied to notions of male dominance and control of female sexuality.

While reliving trauma is dramatic, frightening, and potentially self-destructive, over time a lack of presence can be even more damaging. This is a particular problem with traumatized children. The acting-out kids tend to get attention; the blanked-out ones don’t bother anybody and are left to lose their future bit by bit.

While most people are playing it safe and doing everything they can to avoid pain, successful people know that they must face their fears and do what needs to be done regardless of how they feel. They don’t necessarily like the hard work, but they’re willing to do it because they like the results.

While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.

While the Eternal Feminine in Faust II still appears in personalized form as the Madonna, she works her effects in The Magic Flute as an invisible spiritual power, as music. But this music is the expression of divine love itself, which unites law and freedom, above and below, in the wisdom of the heart and of love. As harmony, it grants humankind divine peace and rules the world as the highest divinity. From the earliest times, magic and music have stood under the rule of the Archetypal Feminine, which in myth and fairy tale is also the mistress of transformation, intoxication, and enchanting sound. Thus it is quite understandable that it is precisely this feminine principle that bestows the magical instruments. The Orpheus motif of the magical taming of the animal energies through music belongs to her, for as mistress of the animals the Great Goddess rules the world of wild as well as tame creatures. She can transform things and people into animal form, tame the animal, and enchant it because, like music, she is able to make the tame wild and the wild tame with the power of her magic.

Who are you without your labels and attachments to the issues you are passionate about? Remove the emotions, remove the beliefs and associations, and simply focus on the rational and practical applications that promote peaceful progression.

While your ego is always trying to figure out its place in the world, your true self knows that your place is always right here, right now.

Who can understand the covert world of the emotions, the secret life of the mind?

Who knows how things happen when one is on a quest or writing a book? It is as if one searches and searches and then, if one can move past the ego's demands and is lucky, sometimes a space opens where books seem to fall open in one's lap and things and people appear, as if magically, to help. Some call it synchronicity or being in the flow; I find it to be a blessed, though often short-lived, state of grace for which I am deeply grateful.

Whoever challenges freaks should notice that in the method he does not mature into a beast.

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

Why are the desert blooms that spring to life after a monsoon so magnificent? The answer is – their impermanence. The lush growth and blooming flowers do not last very long here in the desert, and this new growth only happens once a year. If this growth was never-ending, we would soon take it for granted. Likewise, our human lives. What makes them so special and unique? Our fleeting impermanence.

Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.

Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

Why did this keep happening? Why her? Perhaps there was some pheromone certain people omitted, perceivable only on a wavelength unique to those individuals who preyed on them.

Why do you need validation? Will it serve you to see proof? Let me tell you it hurts more if you do. Here is where you must set boundaries. Cheating a one strike rule because for every one strike you catch them on, you missed three.

Why we ask questions: Questions are the basis of human freedom. Our mind, as a part of our  self experience, is curious and always challenging that part of us that can think about the essence of things. We interpret our lives all the time - with unconscious deep conceptualization - and these conceptualization raise questions. Why did I feel the way I felt yesterday when I spoke with X? What is the meaning of my answer? Why I chose to spend time in X's company and not Y's? And how it changed my attitude toward Y? (Interesting paragraph I translated from the Hebrew edition)

Why would your decision change so much once Susan asks for a nickel apiece? Because, very simply, by asking for money, she has introduced market norms into the equation, and these have chased away the social norms that governed the case of the free cookies. More interesting, it’s clear in both cases that if you take multiple cookies, there will be fewer for the other people in your office. But if Susan offers her cookies for free, I am willing to bet that you will think about social justice, the consequences of appearing greedy, and the welfare of your coworkers. Once money is introduced into the exchange, you stop thinking about what’s socially right and wrong, and you simply want to maximize your cookie intake.

Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)

Will there never be an end that also has a beginning? Will there never be continuity bridging the awful void between now and some other time, a time in the future, a time in the past?

Wisdom is knowing the right thing to do and doing it at the right time to get the desired result. It is also the correct application of knowledge.

Will I stick to the eternity Of never trying? Or will I challenge the uncertainty Of what can happen If I see you again?

Wisdom cannot be bought from the walmart, it can only come from the Holy Spirit of God.

[W]ishing for immortality won't make life last any longer.

Wisdom is the mother of solutions. You cannot upgrade in wisdom and lack solutions and you cannot have a wisdom and be stranded in any challenge you face.