Quotes by Psychologists - Page 16

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love
Erich Fromm
...chuck-full of error, masturbation and Jesus.
Thorndike Edward L
Should the discovery of fire have been avoided because arsonists can misuse it? Any kind of information can be misused by those who are determined to do so. The place to stop the misuse of knowledge is not at the point of inquiry, but at the point of misuse.
Arthur R. Jensen
This is the man who thinks too much, who stands back from his life and never lives it. He is caught in a web of pros and cons about his decisions and lost in a labyrinth of reflective meanderings from which he cannot extricate himself. He is afraid to live, to ‘leap into battle.’ He can only sit on his rock and think. The years pass. He wonders where the time has gone. And he ends by regretting a life of sterility. He is a voyeur, an armchair adventurer. In the world of academia, he is a hairsplitter. In the fear of making the wrong decision, he makes none. In his fear of living, he also cannot participate in the joy and pleasure that other people experience in their lived lives. If he is withholding from others, and not sharing what he knows, he eventually feels isolated and lonely. To the extent that he has hurt others with his knowledge and technology—in whatever field and in whatever way—by cutting himself off from living relatedness with other human beings, he has cut off his own soul.” Refering the the dark magician energy.
Robert Moore
It's very difficult to stay in one's heart as it keeps beating
Amit Abraham
Nature, too, supports our personal blossoming (if we have any quiet exposure to her) through her spontaneities, through her beauty, power, and mirroring, through her dazzling variety of species and habitats, and by way of the wind, Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies.
Bill Plotkin
Happiness is a result of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.
Norman Bradburn
Life is suffering Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering amelioratedTruth is the handmaiden of loveDialogue is the pathway to truth Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and smallSo speech must be untrammeled So that dialogue can take placeSo that we can all humbly learn So that truth can serve loveSo that suffering can be amelioratedSo that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God
Jordan B Peterson
Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
Loss pushes us to difficult places where we have not been before. We often question whether or not we have the courage and stamina to survive the pain. However, we often are given gifts that tell us that we are not alone and that we can withstand the journey.
Susan Barbara Apollon
Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes delinquent, or faces teasing and bullying.
Anthony Biglan
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.
B.F. Skinner
Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well.... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child.
Lisa Coyne
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.
Daniel Todd Gilbert
Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.
Pierre Janet
What we call progress is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
Havelock Ellis
It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.
Rollo May
Cass pulls from my embrace, her mind reaching into my heart. Pain, anger, confusion pass through her eyes. My pain. My anger. My confusion. She swallows hard. “Because?”“Because I traded it all, my heart, my memories, everything. For her.
Christine Fonseca
Rather than assuming weakness or defectiveness, we should acknowledge that getting through depression requires considerable strength. Rather than assuming permanent debility, we should recognize that some depressions are followed by thriving.
Jonathan Rottenberg
Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould
Jonathan Haidt
My job as a therapist is to help victims of trauma understand that they are not to blame. They are not responsible for the bad things that happened to them as children, nor are they responsible for the personal problems that developed as a result. What they are responsible for is fixing those problems. This can only be done by bravely facing the past, identifying the effects that the past has on the present, and working through all the painful emotional baggage.- Scared Selfless
Michelle Stevens
Without awareness, we are not truly alive.
James F.T. Bugental
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
We learn to become more empathic when we slow down, become present, and are fully committed to understanding another person’s uniqueness.
Arthur P. Ciaramicoli
Satire today has become a flat ‘tyre'.
Amit Abraham
It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,-that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
William James
We need feminism because degrading phrases like "walk of shame" are commonplace in our social vocabulary, yet these are only applied to women; whereas men in the same situation are praised by their peers and seen as nothing more than " a guy who got lucky", by the rest of society.
Miya Yamanouchi
Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
William James
We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change.
Henry Cloud
We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.
Darrel Ray
Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick.
Lydia Kwa
Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.
Irving Kirsch
One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.
Rollo May
Sustainable happiness is important, because it not only elevate our own wellbeing locally, but also contributes to collective global flourishing.
Lisa Cypers Kamen
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
Edward de Bono
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Rollo May
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
Being famous is not all that one should want in life...there is much more to life than name and fame...
Amit Abraham
In this kind of personal artwork, jettison any idea that you can help yourself or others by interpreting, praising, or criticizing. These kinds of creative pieces and experiences are only for being with. The only helpful response is to nourish the imagination and your piece by associating other images to it and noticing what feelings it evokes in you.
Jill Mellick
The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.
Erich Fromm
If love was a lucky penny, shiny and unspoiled, secreted in a most unlikely place, then it's tarnished flipside was loss.
Ellery A. Kane
When others witness or comment on abusive behaviors, the little voice that the upscale abused wife once heard inside her and ignored or muffled becomes amplified. Slowly she starts to recognize that she must stop enduring the abuse. . . . each woman comes to grips with her situation at her own pace. However, talking to others is key to her growing capacity to recognize and label her experiences, reclaim herself, target important turning points, and ultimately leave her tormentor.
Susan Weitzman
Personality is a strategy devised by a child. Our true, original self lies under our personality, in the transpersonal ground of our being, at our core.
Neal M. Goldsmith
Not everyone takes action to harvest the experiences of the seasons of life in order to enjoy their bounty.
Andrea Goeglein
Social change doesn’t happen overnight: It takes decades for momentum to build and for the once-radical edge to become mainstream.
Dr. Jean M. Twenge
We do not know what it's like to be a bat, we do not know what it's like to be in coma. we can't even say that we know what it's like to be sleeping. We can say what it's like to be restored to consciousness after sleeping. If there are no dreams during our sleep then the sleeping life is an empty life. We might say of such a life that it's not like being anything. We protect that life on the assumption that come the morning its normal functions will be restored. Suppose it was the case however that such functions were only restored every two days... every eight days... twice a year but only briefly. I assume the point is clear. Actions that end life are irretrievable. If we are mistaken at that point there is no going back.
Daniel N. Robinson
My mind is quiet now. There is no fire or ash, no sulfur or shattering glass. Only silence, empty and cold.
Christine Fonseca
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
Erich Fromm
The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Continued observations in clinical psychological practice lead almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction - for orientation.
William Sheldon
The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.
Judith L. Alpert
In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.
Abraham H. Maslow
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
Erich Fromm
When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world--the world of fixed traits--success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other--the world of changing qualities--it's about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
Carol S. Dweck
The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.
Matthew D Lieberman
Recovery does not refer to an absence of pain or struggle. Rather, recovery is marked by the transition from anguish to suffering. In anguish the paralyzed man and I lived without hope. We experienced anguish as futile pain, pain that revolved in circles, pain that bore no possibility other than more pain, and pain that lead nowhere. However, when we became hopeful, our anguish was transformed into` true suffering. True suffering is marked by an inner peace, i.e., although we still felt great pain, we also experienced a peace in knowing that this pain was leading us forward into a new future.
Patricia E. Deegan
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Red Haircrow
At the sensory level I am the divine receiving station...a two-legged, trembling-tissue, Jodrell Bank radar telescope, dancing, grumbling, sniffling Geiger counter""But there's an added feature. Each generation, I...return. Each time carried onstage, blinking, puking, bawling, bewildered by the bizarre novelty of each new drama, untutored in the language of the new script (did she say her name was Mommie?)
Timothy Leary
People can learn to be more optimistic by acting as if they were more optimistic.
Suzanne C. Segerstrom
You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring it nothing but your eye.
Walter B. Pitkin