Quotes on Psychology

We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can't use shame to change ourselves or others.

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego. Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash.

All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.