c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.
— Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption
The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").
— Brian Luke Seaward, Managing Stress in Emergency Medical Services
Thoughts. Thoughts bombard my head, my brain. My psyche
— Jonathan Harnisch, Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography
When you deal with naked power from an inferior position, perspectives get distorted. He was the aggrieved party and yet he felt guilty and would continue to do so all his life.
— Kiran Nagarkar
Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
— James A. Chu
But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .
— Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere
Oh, come on! Nobody's favorite color is BROWN!
— Lee Blessing
...the higher the expectations about unselected alternatives, the lower the level of satisfaction with the chosen good.
— Michael R. Solomon, Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective
The tongue is the best masseur of furrowed brows.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
The primary treatment modality for DID is individual outpatient psychotherapy.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
— James A. Chu
Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision
— James A. Chu
Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it.
— Clancy Martin, The Philosophy of Deception
we live now in circumstances that encourage rather than discourage lying; evidence and activity are more easily concealed, and the need to rely on demeanor as an indicator of a person’s truthfulness is greater. And our evolutionary history has not prepared us to be very sensitive to the behavioral clues relevant to lying.
— Clancy Martin, The Philosophy of Deception
In what way did your parents screw up to make you the woman you are today?
— Nicki Elson, Vibrizzio
The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Human nature is so complicated that it will never know the exact border between normality and abnormality them they..
— Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
Genes and education are fundamental building blocks with witch man develops personality and lifestyle in one way or other...
— Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
Human person as a unit harmonic and dynamic individual integrates in the living environment using for this purpose all available resources.
— Monica Rus Carmen psychologyst
I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.
— Sally  Graham
He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love. But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.
— Milan Kundera
When it comes to most true bipolars, consider this thought: Genius by birth, bipolar by design.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
The world is your perception of it. Inside and outside always match - they're reflections of each other. The world is a mirror image of your mind.
— Byron Katie, A Friendly Universe: Sayings to Inspire and Challenge You
Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
The traumatic stress field has adopted the term “Complex Trauma” to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature (e.g., sexual or physical abuse, war, community violence) and early-life onset. These exposures often occur within the child’s caregiving system and include physical, emotional, and educational neglect and child maltreatment beginning in early childhood- Developmental Trauma Disorder
— Bessel A. van der Kolk
The moment we refuse to hurt others because of our own pain, is the time we evolve as souls.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic
Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I’d be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.
— Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture
Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.
— Nathaniel Branden
The best way to overcome depression is to work it to death. Whether it be your body or your mind, just be active and some relief you’ll find.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
Years ago I had realized I was blaming myself for it. People and doctors would tell me it wasn't my fault, but I couldn't “BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at fault. No one else could ever do that before, though many tried. Many, many people had tried to tell me it wasn't my fault, but I was convinced it was my fault because I was trying to cheer up my dad.
— Robert Anthony
No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.
— Marty Rubin
The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.
— Erich Fromm
Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.
— Dean Koontz, False Memory
It's like the commercial, "Once you pop you can't stop."  Once you pop a pill, you can't stop.  They have you hooked and they know it.  Like a drug dealer, they are so happy they have won another loyal customer.  Not loyal because you want to be, but loyal because your body is now completely dependent on them and their legal prescription "drugs." 
— Lisa Bedrick, A Christian Look at Psychology Topics
If you do not have enemies on your way to the top, you are already a celebrated failure.
— Osunsakin Adewale
you can't read Human mind by #Psychology... you can read their mind by talking with them at night..
— Self_Thought
In general, people find it easier to accept flattery or false praise than genuine admiration and love, because a build-up does not threaten their negative beliefs about themselves. It is not uncommon for people to dismiss a genuine compliment from someone who really admires them and appreciates their personal qualities. they feel awkward and uncomfortable because this experience causes anxiety, self-consciousness, and guilt about standing out.
— Robert Firestone Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice
A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool Girl – I couldn’t have been Cool Girl with anyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted to. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it: I ate a MoonPie, I walked barefoot, I stopped worrying. I watched dumb movies and ate chemically laced foods. I didn’t think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn’t worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn’t worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles. I didn’t even worry whether the movie made sense. I didn’t worry about anything that came next. Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
There is a characteristic INTJ expression which has become popularly termed "the death glare." This facial expression is actually not a glare, but the INTJ's neutral face.
— Anna Moss, The Secret Lives of INTJs
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The subconscious mind is the guiding force for your entire life.
— Kevin Michel, Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation is a disruption in one or more mental functions. Dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, identity confusion, and identity alterations are core phenomena of dissociative psychopathology which constitute a single dimension characterized by a spectrum of severity.Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience 2014 Dec; 12(3): 171-179The Many Faces of Dissociation: Opportunities for Innovative Research in Psychiatry
— Verdat Sar
Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.
— American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV
Dogma is a defence against the brain’s capacity for free thought based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place.
— Joe Blow
Psychosis is person less persona, raving sincerity.
— Brian Spellman
Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves.
— Clancy Martin, The Philosophy of Deception
Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We’d all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.
— Katandra Jackson Nunnally, Carnal Sobriety
The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
The love and war in the previous injunctions are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game. To seek to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him; and he is a necessary part of one's own Universe, that is, of one's self.
— Aleister Crowley
What if I said, there was a way
— Noah P. Woodward
Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please.
— Katandra Jackson Nunnally, Carnal Sobriety
Memory is dynamic, it's alive.
— Ari Folman
A faith so weak that it is not sufficient unto itself but requires that others tiptoe around it for fear of hurting it, knows deep down that it is a lie.
— Joe Blow
Sufism, they say, is that which enables one to understand religion, irrespective of its current outward form.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I.
— Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century
He is not prone to remember evils, since it is proper to a magnanimous person not to nurse memories, especially not of evils, but to overlook them. He does not speak evil even of his enemies, except when he responds to their wanton aggression.He especially avoids laments or entreaties about necessities or small matters.
— Aristotle on the Megalopsychos
If we can predict, then we have observed enough to know that what we are observing does not just happen randomly; we have noted a pattern of regularities.
— Hugh Coolican
The criminal (as slave) often seeks a person of great perfection (and here, as a judge of people's imperfection, the criminal is much harsher than a good man), because he so wants to obtain trust from outside (not through an inner change of mind). If he believes he has found such a person, he gives himself up to him in the most complete slavery, and he searches in an importunate manner for people whom he could serve as a slave. He also wants to live as a slave so as never to be alone.
— Otto Weininger
Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.
— Eric Hirzel
The great triumph (or horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.
— Caitlin Doughty
People think you have only to ‘tell’ a person that he ‘ought’ to do something in order to put him on the right track. But whether he can or will do it is another matter.
— C.G. Jung
... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.
— Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past
Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).
— Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past
Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success; it takes away from my own depleted emotional resources. It is an imposition in every way. To some of us, it is an inconvenience from which we unashamedly run. We have become experts in maintaining a grand scope of friendships and amateurs in genuine intimacy and care. Unwittingly, we have sacrificed everything on the altar of self-sufficiency—only to discover that we have sold our souls to isolation.
— Sandy Oshiro Rosen, Bare: The Misplaced Art of Grieving and Dancing
Is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation?
— C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity to experience pain that is suspended; the capacity to experience pleasure goes also - because what is blocked is the capacity to experience *feeling*. The same principle applies to the repression of emotions."Chapter 1: Discovering the Unknown Self, pg. 9, Bantam Edition, 1984
— Nathaniel Branden
Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves.
— Saul Bellow
Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.The Nature of Emotions (2001)
— Robert Plutchik
If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.
— Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory
The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all.The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.
— Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political convictions are notoriously inaccessible to argument, and we preserve the traditional beliefs of our childhood in spite of the contradictory facts constantly presented by our experience.
— Bernard Hart
Century after century, the belief that an individual’s physical health was independent of his or her emotional health has so dominated medical thought that there has even been open contempt for anyone who would dare to claim that a person’s physical well-being is the sum of its internal and external influences.
— Sandy Oshiro Rosen, Bare: The Misplaced Art of Grieving and Dancing
None should say: ‘I can trust,’ or ‘I cannot trust’ until he is master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
The lightning said to the oak tree: ‘Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!
— Idries Shah, Reflections
In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
— William James
Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows.
— Frederic Myers
Human Nature is not a problem that can be fixed by rules and regulations. All solutions to the existing problems must be based on how people behave, not on how we think they should behave.
— Kirk Chisholm
No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Ego depletion comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to our temptations that we would rather avoid.
— Bruce Hood
We do not have to be mental health professionals to identify the traits of the possible sociopaths among us.
— P.A. Speers, Type 1 Sociopath - When Difficult People Are More Than Just Difficult People
I have heard that we are spirits having a human experience. Perhaps those of us who have no conscience are dark spirits having a human experience.
— P.A. Speers, Type 1 Sociopath - When Difficult People Are More Than Just Difficult People
There's always something in it for the person who is allowing to be taken advantage of. - Psychotherapist David in Type 1 Sociopath
— P.A. Speers, Type 1 Sociopath - When Difficult People Are More Than Just Difficult People
We may not be able to control life’s circumstances, but we always have a choice about how we use our minds to respond to them.
— Elaine Moran
We can only bring about change in our lives when we clearly see two truths: that the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of fighting our toughest battles, and that by taking the biggest risks, we gain the most valuable rewards.
— Elaine Moran
Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.
— Marlene Steinberg
Your current body is the only body that can take you to your new body—so be kind to it.
— Elaine Moran
While most people are playing it safe and doing everything they can to avoid pain, successful people know that they must face their fears and do what needs to be done regardless of how they feel. They don’t necessarily like the hard work, but they’re willing to do it because they like the results.
— Elaine Moran
We don’t yet have a body of scientific knowledge about evil to be called a facet of psychology. Therefore, religious reasoning for actions will always be at the discretion of the psychologist, thus making them the judge and jury over what is delusion and what is a spiritual experience that has to be sedated.
— Shannon L. Alder
It is awesome to note that the works your work are working but that should not be a joy. The ultimate joy should be that the works of your work are indelible.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, The Untapped Wonderer in You: Dare to Do the Undone
While your ego is always trying to figure out its place in the world, your true self knows that your place is always right here, right now.
— Elaine Moran
Believe it or not, your body has nothing but unconditional love for you. The proof? Without any effort on your part, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and the rhythm of life is graciously flowing through you every second of every day—unconditionally.
— Elaine Moran
Community is about sharing my life
—  about allowing the chaos of another’s circumstances to infringe on mine
However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can’t run away from your own feet.
— Idries Shah
When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised.
— Stefan Molyneux
God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they're so empirically familiar with how atheists think.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him. This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The reason we have such a difficult time losing weight permanently is not because we are making bad choices, but because we are not stopping our automatic subconscious programmed behaviors in their tracks.
— Elaine Moran
The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgment of the validity of the doctrine and of the values which it implies, although such analysis may lead to a better understanding of the real meaning of a doctrine and thereby influence one’s value judgment.What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek for answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, if it is more than a superficial conformance with conventional ideas, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it. But in both cases the psychological motivations are important incentives for arriving at certain conclusions. We can go even further and say that ideas which are not rooted in powerful needs of the personality will have little influence on the actions and on the whole life of the person concerned.
— Erich Fromm
Punishment symptoms Many of the other types of programming produce psychiatric symptoms, usually administered as punishments by insiders who are trained to administer them, if the survivor has breached security or disobeyed the abusers' instructions in other ways. These symptoms serve a variety of purposes, such as disrupting therapy, getting the survivor into hospital, or getting the survivor to return to the perpetrators to have the programming reinforced. p126
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
Thank you Bjork Peterson for a wonderful review of my new book "Why We Love Serial Killers" @readingghost
— Scott A. Bonn
A life without love is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. So, keep love in your heart if not your best friend today will turn to your worst enemy tomorrow.
— Osunsakin Adewale
Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flowstates, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologistwith the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
— Ilona Boniwell
The more we explore, understand, and even come to appreciate our own self-destructive mental attitudes, the more control we gain over our minds.
— Karuna Cayton
Owing to a poorly defined sense of self, people with BPD rely on others for their feelings of worth and emotional caretaking. So fearful are they of feeling alone that they may act in desperate ways that quite frequently bring about the very abandonment and rejection they're trying to avoid.
— Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem
Certainly, it's important to acknowledge and identify the effects of BPD on your life. It's equally important to realize that it neither dictates who you are nor fixes your destiny.
— Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem
Allow yourself to be an anchor and anchored by others.
— Asa Don Brown
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting or making the memories insignificant. Healing means refocusing
— American Pregnancy Association
The hardest thing for a sane person to do is not care what anyone thinks, although everyone swears by it, hence our glorification of insanity.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The loss of my child broke my spirit.
— Asa Don Brown
Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Respect your needs and limitations as you work through your grief and begin to heal
— American Pregnancy Association
If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.
— Adrian Furnham
When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you’re going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life… it’s a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself.
— Patrick Swayze
All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control
— Katie Kacvinsky
Most of the supposedly Sufi organizations, exercises and “orders” are in fact only of archaeological interest.
— Idries Shah, The World of the Sufi: An Anthology of Writings about Sufis and Their Work
If the mind fits, shrink it.
— Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp
At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.
— Peter Mountford, The Dismal Science
Know Thyself
— Oracle of Delphos
Unfortunately, there is no expiration date on grief
— Elizabeth Czukas
Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?...It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.
— Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
each day's life comes with lot of puzzles, mysteries to unravel; being so conscious of life can make one so unconscious of life
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
One thing I want to make clear: I don’t think our old maps are bad. They deserve to be honored for their intent to help guide us safely through life. This is one of the reasons why, when we try to “push through” resistance, it seems to get even harder to move forward. After all, if you were trying to save someone by keeping them from running out into a dangerous situation, and they were pulling against you, you’d try to hold tighter, wouldn’t you?
— Rachel S. Heslin, The Map of Your Life
One thing I want to make clear: I don’t think our old maps are bad. They deserve to be honored for their intent to help guide us safely through life. This is one of the reasons why, when we try to "push through" resistance, it seems to get even harder to move forward. After all, if you were trying to save someone by keeping them from running out into a dangerous situation, and they were pulling against you, you'd try to hold tighter, wouldn't you?
— Rachel S. Heslin, The Map of Your Life
The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated.
— Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi
Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior. With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal.
— Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology
Humans draw a hard line between thinking something and saying it aloud.
— Will McIntosh, Defenders
The self-centered man will always expect nothing but praise. He will hope and expect all incoming criticism to be mere self-projection from the critic because when you're self-centered, self-projection is all you can imagine one can do.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
One of the great self-deceptions--and one of the great foolishnesses--is to tell yourself, Only I will know. Only you will know that you are a liar; only you will know you deal unethically with people who trust you; only you will know you have no intention of honoring your promise. Whose knowledge or judgment do you imagine is more important? It is precisely your own ego from which there is no escape.
— Nathaniel Branden
Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.
— William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course
That which does not come by logic, does not leave by logic.
— Raheel Farooq
A child who is being abused on an ongoing basis needs to be able to function despite the trauma that dominates his or her daily life. That becomes the job of at least one ANP [apparently normal part of the personality], whom the child creates to be unaware of the abuse and also of the multiplicity, and to “pass as normal” in the real world. The ANP is just an alter specialized for handling the adult world—in other words, the “front person” for the system.
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
if... says: 'Do not be greedy, be generous', you may inwardly interpret this in such a manner that you will develop a greed for generosity
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.
— Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.
— Nathaniel Branden
The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.
— Nathaniel Branden
I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.
— Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Anyone who has physically incarnated on the Earth is energetically connected to the people they love, and to the Earth, indefinitely...
— Jonni Gray, Conduit: A Love Story Before During and After Life
It is crucial for us to understand the origins of our low self-esteem before we can transcend it.
— Kevin Solomons, Born to Be Worthless: The Hidden Power of Low Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is the way you regard yourself as either being worth your mother’s while to care for you, protect you and keep you safe and alive, to be present for you when you need her to meet your needs – or not.
— Kevin Solomons, Born to Be Worthless: The Hidden Power of Low Self-Esteem
The qualities required to be a good leader are usually incompatible with the qualities required to become a leader.
— Francis Mont
Socrates made people face their hypocrisy. He had to die.
— Francis Mont
Solutions to mankind’s problems are easy and obvious. They remain unsolved because those who could solve them – don’t want to.
— Francis Mont
The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
I see dull people as projects ... to be reformed
— Ben Elton, Two Brothers
What would it be like to think what a gerbil thinks, from a gerbil's point of view? Kind of like Thomas Nigel's 1974 paper, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' There's a subjective character of experience that's never captured in reductive accounts. Know what I mean?''Um . . . Sure.
— Steven James, The King
To take good care of ourselves, we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. You have to practice going back to your wounded child every day. You have to embrace him or her terderly, like a big brother or a big sister. You have to talk to him, talk to her. And you can write a letter to the Little child in you, of two or three pages, to that you recognize his or her presence, and will do everything you can to heal his or her wounds.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.
— Miguel de Unamuno
Excuses are a promise of repetition.
— Stefan Molyneux
Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.
— Jeremy Griffith, Is It To Be: Terminal Alienation or Transformation For The Human Race
A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1
At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims - gets used to the water - the wave grows small. If we pull the child away when the wave is high, he never sees that, never learns how to swim and remains afraid. If he gets a chance to feel strong, in control, that's called coping. When he copes, he feels better.
— Jonathan Kellerman, Time Bomb