Quotations about Psychology

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. ~Author Unknown


[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945


Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats. ~Douglas Busch


Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke


Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression. ~Mark Epstein


Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution. ~G.K. Chesterton


The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. ~Marvin Dunnette


There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin: Psychology, 1973


Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. ~Vladimir Nabokov, 1951


People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding. ~Wilhelm Stekel


A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. ~Paul Dudley White


The reflex is physiology below the collar button. Psychology is physiology above the collar button. ~Martin H. Fischer


Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. ~Carl Jung


I don't go for this auto-cannibalism. Very damaging. ~Peter O'Toole, on psychoanalysis


But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. ~Alan Watts


The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. ~Sigmund Freud, attributed


If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves. ~Gabrielle Roth


A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. ~Joey Adams


There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere. ~C.G. Jung


There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. ~Ben Williams


Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. ~Carl G. Jung


Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. ~Aeschylus


Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind. ~Moses R. Kaufman


I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unseasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night. ~James Thurber


Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. ~Mason Cooley



If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, on leaving psychotherapy


If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology. ~D.H. Lawrence


There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises. ~Sigmund Freud


Sure you can psychoanalyze! But as Baehr used to say, why bother to sort garbage? ~Martin H. Fischer


Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. ~Carl Jung


Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Thoughts shut up want air,
And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.
~Edward Young, Night Thoughts


Work cure is the best of all psychotherapy, in my opinion.... As well might we expect a patient to recover without food as to recover without work.... The sound man needs work to keep him sound, but the nervous invalid has an even greater need of work to draw him out of his isolation, and to stop the miseries of doubt and self-scrutiny, to win back self-respect and the support of fellowship. ~Richard C. Cabot


Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else. ~David Chase, The Sopranos, "Pilot," original airdate 10 January 1999, spoken by the character Carmela Soprano


A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex. ~S.N. Behrman


It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature. ~G.K. Chesterton, London Observer, 9 December 1934


Psychology has a long past, but only a short history. ~Hermann Ebbinghaus


A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. ~Jerome Lawrence


A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave


The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Depression is rage spread thin. ~George Santayana


Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. ~Voltaire


The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. ~Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, 1943


Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. ~E.M. Cioran


To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness. ~Fyodor Dostoevski


Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries. ~M. Robin D'Antan


Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. ~Thomas Wolfe


Handwriting is autobiography. ~Carrie Latet


Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected the American society within the last fifty years. ~Thomas S. Szasz


Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much? ~Jason Love


Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is - a vice? ~Friedrich Nietzsche, alluding to the proverb "Idleness is the beginning of all vices"


Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis. ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death


Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one. ~William Menninger


To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. ~Fritz Perls


A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work. ~Geoffrey Norman


Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression. ~Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle