Quotes by Psychologists - Page 26

As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: "I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.
Milton Rokeach
If fighting for a cause and for one's right is an indication of aggressiveness then I am proud to be aggressive - you all are free to hate me.
Amit Abraham
Potential is not an endpoint but a capacity to grow and learn.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
Abraham H. Maslow
By all means be submissive in the bedroom (if you are that way inclined), but don't be submissive to life. Being life's bitch is no fun at all. Life may play up in many ways, but it's up to you to take control, take charge and put life in its place.
Miya Yamanouchi
You can be a genius, but you won't get far in life without balance.
Kevin Leman
Humans have evolved levels of cooperation that are unprecedented among primate species. You can see it even in babies. Say you are playing with a baby and begin to put the toys in a box. If you point to one of the toys, the baby is likely to put it in the box (Liebal et al. 2009)... Human babies are more likely than other primates to follow another’s pointing or gaze. Thus, even before adults have socialized them, babies show tendencies to be in sync with the social behavior of others, to infer others’ intentions to cooperate, and to prefer cooperation in others.
Anthony Biglan
There may be more danger in prejudices which are apparently founded in logic than in those which are acknowledged as emotions. (p69)
Edward de Bono
The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.
Philip G. Zimbardo
The difference between a professional victim and an empowered person is NOT what has happened to them, but the way in which they REACT to what has happened to them.
Miya Yamanouchi
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Erich Fromm
Self respect by definition is a confidence and pride in knowing that your behaviour is both honorable and dignified. Therefore when you harass or vilify another person, you not only disrespect them, but you also. -Respect yourself by respecting others.
Miya Yamanouchi
A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.
Martha Stout
This is what creation is. The might and marvel of forever creating out of opposition.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
When a woman is convinced that she can stop the violence in her marriage, her stubborn determination feeds her sense of failure each time she sees that she can’t regulate her husband’s demands and abuses. In a perverse type of review, she may then ask herself how she could have been so stupid as to overlook the early warnings. This further diminishes her self-esteem.
Susan Weitzman
In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.
Tara Brach
Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.
Adrian Raine
The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.
Jonathan Haidt
The validity of Solomon's message has not changed in the three thousand years since he penned it. It comes down through the corridors of time and echoes today with the authority of God Himself. Solomon tells us that the divine commandments are a "light" that will show us "the way to life." But those who would disregard them, both male and female, will suffer the painful consequences.
James C. Dobson
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it.
Erich Fromm
Duncan's temper kindled, but it didn't dampen the lust seeping along his nerve endings. He could flatten this persnickety witch, or better yet, weave a love spell and bind her to him. Maybe he'd do just that and have done with things. He clasped his hands behind his back to quash the temptation to summon magic.
Ann Gimpel
To get what you want, you better learn from the experience.
Andrea Goeglein
The religious guilt cycle interferes with learning and change. Rather than learning who he is as a sexual being, he measures himself against an impossible religious sexual standard and always comes up short. Absent religion, many unrestricted people can deal with their behavior in a rational manner.
Darrel Ray
Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!
Daniel M. Gilbert
Real happiness provides you the confidence that you never thought was obtainable.
Asa Don Brown
The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you—when there’s a loss that will alter your life forever—you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you’ve touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are.
Tara Brach
-If I somehow possessed a set of videotapes that contained all the most significant events of your childhood, in their entirety, would you want to see them?-Absolutely. Right this very second.-But why? Don't you think some of the tapes would be very sad?-Most of them, yes. But if I could see them, then I could have them in my brain like regular memories-horrible memories, yes, but regular memories, not sinister little ghosts in my head that pop out of some part of me I don't even know, and take the rest of me away. Do you know what I mean?-I think so, If you have to remeber, you'd rather do it in the front of your brain than in the back.
Martha Stout
Transformational Fiction teaches how to assess, understand, and heal sexuality.
Anne Stirling Hastings
I may never fly—in the bird sort of way. But I do have wings.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Your value lies not in status or title, but in the roots of your character and depth of your compassion.
Mollie Marti
17. One of the secrets of successful living is found in the word balance, referring to the avoidance of harmful extremes. We need food, but we should not overeat. We should work, but not make work our only activity. We should play, but not let play rule us. Throughout life, it will be important to find the safety of the middle ground rather than the imbalance of the extremes.
James C. Dobson
Female competition is when you are with a guy you like and you look around, see that you're the prettiest girl in the vicinity and feel a huge sense of relief that there's no one to take the attention away from you. (Female competition is a result of women feeling like their greatest sense of self worth , identity and influence comes from their sexual appeal to men. Many women don't even realise they are feeling this way and it's a subconscious thing, but they notice themselves getting jealous when they see other women who they think men would find sexually appealing.)
Miya Yamanouchi
God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Sometimes I found that in my happy moments I could not believe that I had ever been miserable.
Joanna Field
Third, it is helpful to seek advice from those who are spiritually mature and solid in their faith. A godly counselor or pastor can assist you in avoiding the common mistakes that confuse many young people.
James C. Dobson
But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is 'silly,' and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.
Rollo May
29. Most loneliness results from insulation rather than isolation. In other words, we are lonely because we insulate ourselves, not because others isolate us.
James C. Dobson
That is why in adult life, people generally tend to relive rather than live, that is, to repeat the patterns of the past and defend the primary fantasy in the defiance, and avoid the real gamble or real adventure of taking a chance on something new. They are afraid that if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they'll be in the same panicky frightened state they were in when they were little.
Robert W. Firestone
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
Jonathan Haidt
And what the music elicits—in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it—is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween.
William Todd Schultz
Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster.
Anne Wilson Schaef
Dear billion dollar eyes they are a paupers dream
Amit Abraham
...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality.
Virginia M. Axline
Perhaps the day will come where the validity of one's spirituality will be judged not by the correctness of one's theology but by the authenticity of one's spiritual life. When that day comes, an authentically spiritual Buddhist and an authentically spiritual Christian may find that they have more in common with each other than they do with those in their respective religions who have failed to develop their spirituality. (Beyond Religion, p. 98)
David N. Elkins
But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie, and if he can do it and not get caught, he will lie. Being victimized as a child has become a ready excuse for perpetrating child molestation. The offender who claims he himself was victimized gets seen as less of a "monster" than one who wasn't a victim, and he gains much more empathy and support. It is hard to trust self-reports of sex offenders about abuse in their past when such reports are in their best interest.Only a few studies on this topic have used objective measures, and they have found very different results.[102]
Anna C. Salter
Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.
Alice MIller
Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
Paul Bloom
Christians who fail also avoid other Christians, especially when they are feeling bad and guilty in the midst of their failure. It's sad to see this dynamic of the law happen in the church and then see the opposite happen in Twelve Step groups. In these recovery groups, people are taught that the very first thing to do when you fail is to call someone in the group and get to a meeting. They are taught to "run to grace," as it were, to turn immediately to their higher power and their support system. The sad part is that this theology is more biblical than what is practices in many Christian environments, where people in failure run from instead of to God and the people they need.
Henry Cloud
Only through becoming aware of yourself and your limitations can you be transparent with others.
Joanie Connell
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
Rollo May
Ien stopped her voice with more kisses, more promises of a world filled with only them.
Christine Fonseca
We are eternal beings who are connected to God, Source, or whatever you feel comfortable labeling the Divine. What this means is that we are here for joy and for love.
Susan Barbara Apollon
Lifelong pain, an unwanted pregnancy, and even death may be the reward for such a brief window of pleasure. What a foolish gamble!
James C. Dobson
I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.
Carl R. Rogers
The researchers found that nearly every change they made was followed by a temporary uptick in performance, even when it involved simply undoing a previous change. They concluded that the increases in worker productivity were not due to better lighting or better pay or longer breaks per se. They were just temporary improvements caused by a change in routine.
Hal Herzog
In fact, it has been said that when you have sex with someone, you are actually having sex with everyone who ever slept with that individual.
James C. Dobson
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives . . . most of the things that are interesting important and human are the results of creativity . . . when we are involved in it we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Positive emotions and mental states may make people more resilient to stress, like sturdy tree branches that bend but don’t break when battered by a storm
Melanie Greenberg
Cultivate plants which attract lovely company.
Kathryn Hall
The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.
Tara Brach