Best 3064 quotes in «psychology quotes» category

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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)

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

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 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.

[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.

Within just about every serial predator, there are two warring elements: A feeling of grandiosity, specialness, and entitlement, together with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness and a sense that they have not gotten the breaks in life that they should

Within our emotions lie answers, truths and instructions.

Without confidence we feel insecure. We replay the doubting voices of our parents on a loop in our own minds.

Without a map of our natural and social world - a picture of the world and of one's place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion - human beings would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. [...] Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map has never been entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living.

Without the ability to be present we are missing much of what the adventure has to offer.

Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful...When we are not fixated on threat and defending ourselves, when we're not exhausted and burned out from chronic stress, we are able to see the daily evidence that we are in the midst of a mind-blowing miracle called Life....Then we will experience breathtaking, heart-rippling moments that counterbalance every trial and tribulation. When we're fully conscious of the universe's artistry and generosity, who needs psychodelics or Prozac?

With silence comes mindfulness, and thus we become better at choosing our words with kind intent before we express them.

With practice, INTJs become skilled at nodding and making responsive noises at appropriate times, while internally wondering whether dolphins have language or thinking about how Star Wars breaks the laws of physics.

Without you discovering your true picture, it will be hard to have a glorious future. It is the discovery of what you have inside and the pursuit of it that can guarantee a glorious future

With the concept of an afterlife, religion creates a portal to infect people by means of terror and fear of death. If one has no concept of an afterlife, then fear of eternal punishment becomes an effective way to convince people of the need to perform specific rituals and live a certain way.

Women always cried. It was their last, best weapon. It made boyfriends apologize and husbands fold them in their arms. It made Daddy spend the extra money on the prom dress.

Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.

Women have a sense about themselves. There are certain vibes they can feel. They just know. It’s survival instinct we were born with and mine was going off like a bean si on coke.

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it. To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self.

Wonderment shared is doubled. Love shared is infinite.

Words only penetrate the heart when spoken in truth.