Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Steven Pinker
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valery
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
Mason Cooley
The chief difficulty for those who begin the study of scientific psychology is that all men indulge in popular psychology.
Karl Friedrich Munzinger
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
Susan Sontag
The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.
Carl Jung
The brain is wider than the sky.
Emily Dickinson
Great spirits have often overcome violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
The happiness of of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius
Life can show up no other way than that way in which you perceive it.
Neale Donald Walsch
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Victor Frankl
But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, ‘describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands’.
Raymond Cattell
Hence, wherever we meet with vital phenomena that present the two aspects, physical and psychical there naturally arises a question as to the relations in which these aspects stand to each other.
Wilhelm Wundt
It is easier to understand mankind in general than any individual man.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
What you are will show in what you do.
Thomas Edison
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
Introspection is always retrospection.
Sartre
Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.
Franklin P. Adams
Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes.
Robert Brault
It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
G.K. Chesterton
To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
Edward Thorndike
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Jean Piaget
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
John Locke
Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
Humphry Davy
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Learn one way; react. Learn many ways; understand.
Tadeu Dias
When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
Plato
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ”spirit” over matter.
Susan Sontag
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”
Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters
“Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”
Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
George Orwell, 1984
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
Theodore Kaczynski
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
Carl Gustav Jung
