Best 3064 quotes in «psychology quotes» category

The more risk averse a person is, the higher his or her religiosity [...]. In other words, risk-averse people don't want to take a chance on getting on the wrong side of god.

The more we explore, understand, and even come to appreciate our own self-destructive mental attitudes, the more control we gain over our minds.

The most chronic and complex of the dissociative disorders, multiple personality disorder, was renamed multiple personality disorder, was renamed 'dissociative identity disorder' in 1994 in DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association). The rationale for the name change, was among other things, to clarify that there are not literally separate personalities in a person with dissociative identity disorder; 'personalities' was a historical term for the fragmented identity states that characterize the condition.

The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I.

The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").

The most dangerous thing to the USA population is not North Korea, it is the USA government.

The most important study is the practical and sincere study of one’s self: Know Thyself. It is more important to know the truth about one's self than trying to find out the truth about heaven and hell." —Sepideh Irvani, PsyD

The most effective way to understand the dissonance between our thoughts about reality and reality itself, is to consider how many times we've felt like our world is ending and how many times it actually has.

The most important thing that I learned from a decade of using the medical profession is that you need to supervise your doctors.

The most insulting aspect of insincere people is that while they're pretending to be something other than what they are, they're inherently positing a different reality to you.

The most profound discoveries are often in plain view, you just need to know where to look for them.

The most talented people are always the nicest.

The natural rose and artificial rose fragrances the reality itself. Similarly, A spiritual healer inspires the incredible and magnificent vision and insight of psychology, which predicts the Divine gift. Whereas, a psychologist, qualified from an institution presumes its study prospects. The discrepancy endorses clarity itself.

The narrative illusion introduces a “mind virus”, which is a syntactical contagion that spreads through communicative vectors and colonizes the cognitive biases of the targeted individual’s psychology, thus transforming the mental processes of that target.

The natural laws of life is not an idea but the truth that holds life on existence. Once you realize the truth within, all your problems and queries of life, cease to exist.

The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are." ―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_

The need for challenge and exploration arises mostly out of the blockage of fulfillment of lower level needs, giving rise to a pervading restlessness. Out of this restlessness there arises much pathology as searchers collide with established structuring and functioning of the environment. Out of this restlessness there also arises a small cadre of creative deviants whose insights and inventions have provided the leverage which has enabled man to increase his standard of living and his compassionate concern for his fellows. Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing has always gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from whom alone will come the conceptualizations of an evolutionary designing process which can assure us an open ended future -- toward whose realization we can all participate.

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.

The neurons create who you are. They create your passions. They create your ambitions. They create your unique identity, based on experiences.

Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield)

The notion that a woman's sexuality belongs only to the husband is a central tenet tied to the idea that a woman is the property of the father first, then the property of the husband.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition.

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.

The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it. At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves

The one that looks beyond the mind knows there is only one truth to find. There among the highs and lows, in and outs and ups and downs remains a stillness every unbound.

The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency.

The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.

...the only way out consists of using a social mask. This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else. ... If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both psychological and physical. The psychological feeling of being trapped comes afterwards from the need to have social life, and that's when the anti-social personality starts developing furthermore.

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

The only way to go back in time is by moving into the future

The only voice of dissent you have to dispel is your own.

The only way we can revive our memories, if we are willing to ponder about the events that was never discussed for years by looking back at old photos or written texts which gives us a clue about the event we are trying to recall about. If that strategy is accomplished, we will have a clear episodic memory about that particular event that we perceive it as very significant to us.

Theories without data are like daydreams.

the parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more “calculating” part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year’s resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused.

The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.

The opposite of self-assertiveness is self-abnegation--abandoning or submerging your personal values, judgment, and interests. Some people tell themselves this is a virtue. It is a "virtue" that corrodes self-esteem.

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

The pain I feel from the razor blade doesn’t even come close to what I’m feeling inside so it’s useless because the equation is messed up: because razor blade pain should be equal to or greater than the heartache, that’s just CUTTING 101. And if it’s not—well you’re fucked, my friend. It was nice knowing you, but you know what time it is? It’s time to let to let the darkness in. Quid pro quo and all that. It’s time to find something more agonizing than the touch of the blade.

The person following is never in control, which she knows full well and which is exactly why she does it.

The person who says it is lonely at the top has no idea what the view looks like from above. ~ Aarush Kashyap

The police are the problem and internal affairs are not the solution.

The police can be more corrupt than the criminals.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man—and woman—finds union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity.

The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles.

The police have turned into a health and safety issue for the general public.

The presence of the inner feeling of emptiness directs our attention to a past experience of guilt and to our inner feeling awareness of the cause in the past. We must be sensitive to that feeling and accept it in order to chase down the cause, ferret it out, reassess the value of the experience to us in order not to further project the blame in anger outward to an external cause.

The prevailing assumption is 'If I understand the world, then I'll do the right things and I'll be successful.' Traditionally, we overlooked learning about ourselves, which is equal in importance.