Explore Quotes by Karen Horney

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

Until I feel strong enough to pray sincerely and to act accordingly, I would rather not pray at all.

Thou shalt free thyself from convention, from everyday morality.

Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.

When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling.

Why is it so unutterably beneficial, the thought that someone besides myself knows me?

The psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men.

We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?

There's still such chaos in me. Still so little firmly outlined. Just like my face: a formless mass that only takes on shape through the expression of the moment. The searching for our selves is the most agonizing

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

If I couldn't be pretty, I decided I would be smart.

There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live.

The view that women are infantile and emotional creatures, and as such, incapable of responsibility and independence is the work of the masculine tendency to lower women's self-respect.

Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men.

To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown.

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.

Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

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

If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.