Quotes about Psychology

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, (P. 1)

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

An interesting question these psychologists tend not to ask is why the muscle metaphor is apt. In other words, why is it that early successes at self-discipline lead to more successes, whereas early lapses lead to more lapses? If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn't expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there's no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?

We are more heavily invested in the theories of failure than we are in the theories of success.

She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty and dry.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. (on being 36 yrs old)

I call myself 'Christ-leaning,' but that's primarily psychological.