Best 3064 quotes in «psychology quotes» category

Modern man's feeling of isolation and powerlessness is increased still further by the character which all his human relationships have assumed. The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality. In all social and personal relations the laws of the market are the rule.

Mohammed took his tribal customs and traditions and injected them into his new religion. Many of the ideas and traditions he implemented were already contained in the tribes he conquered, so in many cases, no major changes were required of his new followers. For example, most, if not all, of the tribes were polygamous. Women were seen primarily as chattel and under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. The communities of the new Islamic religion in the 600s CE often converted en masse. With minor modifications, they kept practicing their traditions. Mecca was already a major pagan religious shrine; Mohammed conveniently changed it into a place of worship and pilgrimage for Allah. Practically speaking, Mohammed unified a fracture region under a single religion and did it with a superior military. Conquest, war, and male predominance were the hallmarks of Islam. Despite political splits over the centuries, the tribal nature of Islam remains intact.

Modern governments have the pernicious problem of trying to reward too many corporate donors.

Money, fame, knowledge, influence, freedom, speech and movement - are all derivatives of control; all earthlings who inhabit the earth will pursue control for most of their lifetimes with no exceptions, closely followed by the pursuit of pleasure.

Money is not the root of all evil. A lack of empathy is.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Money is our shelter, the only way we have to access life. But at the same time, if you want money you have to renounce life.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It’s not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it’s certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?

More and more people will start telling themselves: "I don't understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I've seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I'm a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.

More often than not, it’s disrespectful to them (our children) - and disrespectful to their struggle with their tasks in life- if our own anxiety as parents makes us cling to our children. It’s disrespectful is we demand more intimacy than they are willing or able to give. Too much involvement with our children is not an act of love- it’s an act of selfishness.

More than ninety-five percent of your brain activity, as you consciously read this sentence, is being used by your subconscious mind.

More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment

Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.

Most importantly, the very inception of the treatment itself necessarily induces a change in the patient's conscious attitude to his illness...that he does not listen carefully enough to what he obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse.

Most of our failures in understanding one another have less to do with what is heard than with what is intended and what is inferred.

Most of us only put in as much effort as a situation requires from us. If we can 'get away' with being less considerate or less reciprocal, and various other forms of 'getting without giving,' many of us will, not because we're evil, but simply because we can. If people demanded or expected more of us we would do more, but when they don't, we don't make the effort. This dynamic is true in practically every relationship we have. When our self-esteem is low and we expect very little of others, we are likely to get very little from them as well.

Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

Most people do not see their words as power.

Most of what official adolescent psychology considers the "characteristics of puberty," turn out in character-analytic work to be the artificially produced effect of obstructed natural sexuality. This holds true for daydreaming as well as for inferiority feelings.

Most people are scumbags. Accept it. Let go. Chill out, douchebags.

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to - they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia - the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

Most of us would rather kill ourselves than be, particularly if who we think we are keeps dying. Many of us do.

Most people are asleep and need to be confronted, like adults that are still behaving like they're 5 years old, and don't want to assume responsibility for their mistakes.

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.

Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.

Most people put too much emphasis and value on their own family, but when a family is promoting anti-survival ideals, it is actually healthier to hate it. Anyone depending too much on the opinions of others, parents or not, whenever such individuals are deeply insane or ignorant, or both, is absorbing the wrong mindset and creating the foundation of what we know as failure. It is only when you make the wrong rules yours, and never before that, that failure becomes a personal thing. The replication of false paradigms replicates similar experiences in personal finance and relationships, but also in other areas of life.

Most people think that if you do not love yourself fully, no one else will. That is not true. People are perfectly capable of giving love even if they feel less confident about themselves.

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.

Most people, whatever their opinions and protestations, do not want to learn.

...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.

Much of contemporary "realism" turns out to be just a variation on good old fashioned fatalism: people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of 'nature'. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we try not to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean we should freely express violence? We cannot. Submission to genetic programming can become dangerous, because it leaves us helpless.

Music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what comes next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can't make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don't get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don't get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity.

Must you constantly reduce everything to sex?

My brain has a mind of its own.

My dreams keep me up at night

My father had started counting every penny he put into me. Every dime. Every dollar. He couldn’t give me a gift or hand me food without telling me how much I took from him. How selfish I was. How much my existence cost him. I had decided that I was worth exactly a dollar and if my father had to choose between the dollar and me, he would choose the dollar. TV was far more valuable.

My focus is on understanding why people commit violent and predatory acts, not to help them become better, more law-abiding citizens, but to aid in catching them, prosecuting them, and putting them away

My father's haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory.

My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

My mind is like the Titanic, to many brain cells for the life boats.

My head is a prison I’ve been locked in from the start, So if I'm treated like a criminal I might as well play the part. (attrib: E. Tancarville)

My love is infinite.

My mother, my psychiatrist and an assortment of sedatives eventually convinced me I was delusional.

My past will never paralyze me, I will never fear my future and I will always prevail in my present situation. I am resilient.

My psychiatrist said I had charisma so at least I'm certified

My love for you will always exist.

My mother was beautiful, but insecure, and she boosted her lack of confidence with boasting and bragging. Every story was embellished. Every truth, exaggerated. The rule with my mother is simple. Believe nothing.

My music had been my solace and I lived without it for ten years.

My opinion of me is what sets the tone of my personality