Quotes on Psychology

Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.

Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this, they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grew out of the experience of love.

To do this, you can bring in nothing from the past. So the more psychology you've studied, the harder it will be to empathize. The more you know the person, the harder it will be to empathize. Diagnoses and past experiences can instantly knock you off the board. This doesn't mean denying the past. Past experiences can stimulate what's alive in this moment. But are you present to what was alive then or what the person is feeling and needing in this moment?

Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

There are... for us no instincts—we no longer need the term in psychology. Everything we have been in the habit of calling an 'instinct' today is a result largely of training—belonging to man's learned behavior.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

The coward regards himself as cautious, the miser as thrifty.

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .

I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.

I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one

All that matters on the Chessboard is good moves.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.