Top 1169 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Psychologists - Page 17

Interestingly, the very experience of fear itself is the tip-off moment, the signal that a possibility for action is opening up and so a choice needs to be made.

Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal relationships.

I had a patient once who dreamed she kept her husband in the deep freeze except for mating. Lots of men feel that way.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.

A misbehaving child, is a discouraged child

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

There has been a great gulf in psychological thought between the perception of space and objects on one hand and the perception of meaning on the other.

Donald Trump may have a long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

Being human means there's a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we're all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.

The central trait of sociopathy is a complete lack of conscience, which is very difficult for most people to get their heads around, because those of us who do have a conscience can't really imagine what it would be like if we didn't. Most people think that deep down everybody has a conscience, and it turns out that's just not true.

Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don't transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence - as in punishment and deterrence - is needed to rein in our worst instincts.

Nature is at work. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that.

You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.

You just don't get funding to go out and find God. Even if you did, you'd have to first define what you mean by 'God.'

We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material.

If we wish to imitate the physical sciences, we must not imitate them in their contemporary, most developed form; we must imitate them in their historical youth, when their state of development was comparable to our own at the present time. Otherwise we should behave like boys who try to copy the imposing manners of full-grown men without understanding their raison d' être, also without seeing that in development one cannot jump over intermediate and preliminary phases.

The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone.

Life is too short so we must generalize.

Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane.

You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!'

The meaning of life cannot be told; it has to happen to a person ... To speak as though it were an objective knowledge, like the date of the war of 1812, misses the point altogether.

Beauty is an asset, just like physical prowess, charisma, brains or emotional intelligence. The key with any gift is in the way that you use it. It doesn't define you as a person. Rather, it's an asset to be used judiciously and with an understanding of how it is just a small part of who you are.

Beauty draws us in. We can't stop looking or listening or touching. It takes us outside ourselves and it motivates us. It's essential to life and to happiness.

Genes do make a contribution to the IQ score - but a flower needs soil. The environment for poor people is so overwhelmingly powerful, it washes out the genetic effect. There is a genetic contribution to IQ, but you can't detect it when you're living in a deprived environment.

There are no shortcuts to true excellence.

Adulthood was invented to repair the wounds of childhood.

This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated.

In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings.

Live with integrity, respect the rights of other people, and follow your own bliss.

Awareness without action is worthless.

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind.

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

If you believe that you are bad and unacceptable, you are unable to look back at your past with pleasure or your future with hope. Only bad things happened to you in the past, and only bad things will happen to you in the future.

Both women and computer science are the losers when a geeky stereotype serves as an unnecessary gatekeeper to the profession.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus taught his students that what happens to them is not as important as what they believe happens to them. In this engaging and provocative book, Eldon Taylor provides his readers with specific ways in which their beliefs can lead to success or failure in their life undertakings. Each chapter provides nuggets of wisdom as well as road maps for guiding them toward greater self-understanding, balance, responsibility, and compassion.

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

We live in a world filled with language. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community. Writers are either polluters or part of the clean-up team. Just as the language of power and greed has the potential to destroy us, the language of reason and empathy has the power to save us. Writers can inspire a kinder, fairer, more beautiful world, or invite selfishness, stereotyping, and violence. Writers can unite people or divide them.

Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one's thoughts but also to be talented in one's feelings as well.

The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness.

The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943.

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering.

In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others.

We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.

The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.

Extraverts are comfortable thinking as they speak. Introverts prefer slow-paced interactions that allow room for thought. Brainstorming does not work for them. Email does.

Autism spectrum disorders are linked to other problems: Most of the people we see in our Asperger clinic for adults also suffer from clinical levels of depression.

[a] heavy sense of guilt [is] the most potent factor in the whole psychologic picture of motherliness.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.

The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

If a community values its children, it must cherish its mothers.

We're only as needy as our unmet needs.

You're not a failure if you don't make it. You're a success because you tried.

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

In trusting, we let ourselves go. We know that all kinds of unexpected events may come our way. Our tension eases, our mind and our hearts open spontaneously to be possibilities. It is an ever new state of mind, in the present moment, because we have detached from all we know. But it is also a feeling as old as can be, because, before all betrayals and all disappointments, there was a time in which trusting another was the very substance of our life.

We have been the benefactors of our cultural heritage and the victims of our cultural narrowness.