The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas MannRead
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
Interpretation
Understanding others requires insight into their desires and intentions.
This quote by Thomas Mann suggests that to comprehend why people act the way they do, one must consider their underlying goals, needs, and motives. It emphasizes the importance of empathy and perspective in interpersonal relationships, implying that behavior is often a reflection of what individuals strive to achieve or fulfill in their lives.
In practice
A psychologist might use this quote to explain the significance of understanding a patient's background.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.
The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality.
Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.
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