Psychology Quotes

There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

Through others we become ourselves.

There are... for us no instincts—we no longer need the term in psychology. Everything we have been in the habit of calling an 'instinct' today is a result largely of training—belonging to man's learned behavior.

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.

You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one

If you are not prepared to look at your pupils strength's, don't touch their weaknesses.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.

Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.

It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

If it's not one thing, it's your mother.

Problem talk creates problems, Solution talk creates solutions.

Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?

This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.

A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

I'd always had an interest in physiotherapy and psychology.

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis.

I sometimes lie, especially about personal things, because what does it matter? I am a kind of minute commodity. My name is no longer my own. I try to lie as much as I can when I’m interviewed. It’s reverse psychology. I figure if you lie, they’ll print the truth.

When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.

Psychopaths view any social exchange as a ‘feeding opportunity,’ a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

You got to have the killer instinct. If you do not have it, forget about basketball and go into social psychology or something. If you sometimes wonder if you've got it, you ain't got it. No pussycats, please.

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side...
It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings,
his illnesses,
his sins,
but little about his potentialities,
his virtues,
his achievable aspirations or his psychological health...
We must find out what psychology might be if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited,
pessimistic and stingy preoccupations with human nature.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses . . . Each generation . . . will have its creed.

Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

Psychology is the most important factor in chess.

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

I am convinced that an important stage of human thought will have been reached when the physiological and the psychological, the objective and the subjective, are actually united, when the tormenting conflicts or contradictions between my consciousness and my body will have been factually resolved or discarded.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.