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 β 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.
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
They donβt need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when theyβre trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
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.
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
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