66 Psychology Quotes

In our quest to unravel the complexities of the human mind, few resources are as enlightening and thought-provoking as the words of those who have dedicated their lives to the study of psychology. Whether you’re a seasoned professional, a student of the discipline, or simply someone fascinated by the intricacies of behavior and mental processes, the insights from great thinkers can offer profound understanding and inspiration. In this collection, we’ve gathered 66 of the most impactful psychology quotes that capture the essence of human nature, motivation, and emotion. Dive in, and let these timeless words illuminate new perspectives and spark deeper reflections.

1. “Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.” - Wilhelm Reich

2. “She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.” - Thomas Harris

3. “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” - Charles Dickens

4. “We forget very easily what gives us pain.” - Graham Greene

5. “There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation -- the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living.” - Mark E. Smith

6. “What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.” - Margaret Atwood

7. “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” - Theodore Kaczynski

8. “The mind thinks thoughts that we don't plan. It's not as if we say, 'At 9:10 I'm going to be filled with self-hatred.” - Sharon Salzberg

9. “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” - Frantz Fanon

10. “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.” - Frantz Fanon

11. “Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling is really 'I'-'It'.” - Mauric Friedman

12. “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ” - Carl Gustav Jung

13. “It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.” - Isaac Asimov

14. “As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.” - Sri Aurobindo

15. “She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.” - Jeffery Deaver

16. “Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.” - Stendhal

17. “Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?” - Stendhal

18. “A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.” - Viktor E. Frankl

19. “What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe” - Thomas Gilovich

20. “there is no problems, only solutions".” - Vesa Peltonen

21. “We live in a society that shuns guilt, hardly knows it. It is drummed into us: "Don't feel guilty." No one wants to pay the price of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness.” - Robert Dykstra

22. “Denial is a useful defense mechanism until it's not.” - Rosalind Kaplan

23. “Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.” - Alice Miller

24. “попробуй выучиться одному нехитрому фокусу, Глазастик, - сказал он. - Тогда тебе куда легче будет ладить с самыми разными людьми. Нельзя по-настоящему понять человека, пока не станешь на его точку зрения...- Это как?- Надо влезть в его шкуру и походить в ней.(Аттикус Финч - Глазастику Финч)” - Harper Lee

25. “Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions!” - George W. Crane

26. “Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.” - Peter Kreeft

27. “Their daddy was fond of saying that mistakes weren't sins. The sin was not to learn from them.” - Judith Henry Wall

28. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.” - Philip K. Dick

29. “Is it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real.” - Stephen R. Covey

30. “Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.” - Daniel J. Siegel

31. “Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.” - Ken Page

32. “Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you’re due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings.” - Donald Van de Mark

33. “The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual” - C.G. Jung

34. “She realized, when relationships failed to last, it was not because love was no longer present, but because people had stopped believing in themselves and in their partners.” - Christina Westover

35. “Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.” - Irvin Yalom

36. “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” - James P. Carse

37. “On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.” - Carl Elliott

38. “And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again...Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.” - Hermann Hesse

39. “‎"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” - Carl Jung

40. “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.” - Abraham Harold Maslow

41. “A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.” - Jane McGonigal

42. “He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.” - Margaret Atwood

43. “When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.” - Sharon Salzberg

44. “So what is a good meditator? A good meditator meditates.” - Allan Lokos

45. “The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.” - Thomas M. Sterner

46. “Are you seeking to be offended?” - Asa Don Brown

47. “Pure happiness and peace are at their peak when your body is in harmony with itself.” - Asa Don Brown

48. “Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.” - Sharon Salzberg

49. “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

50. “We all have issues & we have usually come by them honestly.” - Allan Lokos

51. “A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.” - Edward L. Glaeser

52. “A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen.” - Noam Shpancer

53. “There is no part of one’s beliefs about oneself which cannot be modified by sufficiently powerful psychological techniques. There is nothing about oneself which cannot be taken away or changed. The proper stimuli can, if correctly applied, turn communists into fascists, saints into devils, the meek into heroes, and vice-versa. There is no sovereign sanctuary within ourseles which represents our real nature. There is nobody at home in the internal fortress. Everything we cherish as our ego, everything we believe in, is just what we have cobbled together out of the accident of our birth and subsequent experiences. With drugs, brainwashing, and other techniques of extreme persuasion, we can quite readily make a man a devotee of a different ideology, the patriot of a different country, or the follower of a different religion.” - Peter J. Carroll

54. “(Για τους αυτόχειρες)Πρόκειται για ανθρώπους που απογοητεύονται στη ζωή ευκολότερα από άλλους γιατί περιμένουν πολλά.” - Άλφρεντ Άντλερ

55. “Spending longer thinking about the problem before you dive in is likely to lead to higher levels of creativity in the final product.” - Jeremy Dean

56. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.” - Sigmund Freud

57. “A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.” - B.F. Skinner

58. “Enquanto a consciência patriarcal aniquila o tempo e ultrapassa os lentos processos de transformação e evolução da natureza através do uso deliberado de experimentação e calculo, a consciência matriarcal permanece pesa ao encantamento da lua mutável. Como a lua, sua iluminação e sua liminosidade estão ligadas ao fluxo do tempo e a periodicidade. Deve esperar que o tempo amadureça enquanto a compreensão, como uma semente plantada, também amadureça com ele.” - Erich Neumann

59. “Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.” - Winterson Jeanette

60. “Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.” - Fulton J. Sheen

61. “People sometimes imagine that without desire there would be no enjoyment. The opposite is true. When you're caught up in craving, you never really enjoy anything very much because your mind is always pulling you on to the next desire and the next after that. When you let go of desire, then you're free to enjoy whatever is right in front of you.” - Lorne Ladner

62. “All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.” - Asa Don Brown

63. “لا أعلم لماذا شجعتني دموعها علي الخوض بأحاديث أخري أكثر خصوصية ، إن الدموع تكسر الحواجز النفسية حقاً ، الكثير منها...” - حسني محمد الشحات

64. “Just to let you know I don't post my books and things on the net in hopes of being rich. The reason is. "I am a person with Bipolar Disorder" and they're are a lot of great minds on the "Famous Bipolar" list that died penniless. If I do the same it's no big deal but having a form of mental Illness I would love to get my name on the Bipolar list also one day. Preferably while I'm still living so I can make sure they spelled it right” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

65. “When the mind is free, magic happens.” - C.G. Rousing

66. “One percent of people will always be honest and never steal," the locksmith said. "Another one percent will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television. And the rest will be honest as long as the conditions are right - but if they are tempted enough, they'll be dishonest too. Locks won't protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock".” - Dan Ariely