c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.
— Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
The human being is so complicated in some ways, and yet so simple in others. Sometimes, we need complex medication regimens. Yet, sometimes, we just need a good cry.
— Vironika Tugaleva
And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Psychology is a condensed version of mindset
—  whereas philosophy is an abstract of the human society.
People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.
— Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality
Psychotherapy and counselling should make people aware of themselves and of the difficulties which they face. This then gives them the freedom to choose for themselves. In this sense, unlike behaviour therapy, psychotherapy is value-free: no advice, suggestions or recriminations are given. Indeed the only value of psychotherapy is respect for the individual. Such respect, however, in a mechanistic and objectifying society ... becomes a political act.
— Paul Kline, Psychology Exposed, Or, the Emperor's New Clothes
Want to do something noble and courageous while you're on this Earth treat the mentally ill like they have some worth.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Characteristics of System 1: • generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions • operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control • can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) • executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training • creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory • links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance • distinguishes the surprising from the normal • infers and invents causes and intentions • neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt • is biased to believe and confirm • exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) • focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)• generates a limited set of basic assessments • represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) • computes more than intended (mental shotgun) • sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) • is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* • overweights low probabilities* • shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* • responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* • frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
The danger of refusing to reflect upon the psychological dynamics of faith and belief is that what we feel to be self evidently true, for psychological reasons, might be, upon inspection, highly questionable, intellectually or morally. Too often, as we all know, the 'feeling of rightness' trumps sober reflection and moral discernment. Further, we are often unwilling to listen to others until we are, to some degree, psychologically open to persuasion. The Parable of the Sower comes to mind.
— Richard  Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality
In short, the Lord's Supper was the realization of new social and political arrangements, the embodiment of the social leveling seen in Jesus' ministry, most profoundly in his acts of table fellowship. Importantly, as we have seen, these new social arrangements could only be achieved if the emotions of social stratification were confronted, eliminated, or reinterpreted. In his body metaphor, Paul dramatically reframes these heretical emotions, the emotions of contempt, disgust, honor, and social presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.
— Richard  Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Once you talk to your brain and emotions, thus how is going to respond.
— Mikidady Selungwi
No one will recognize you unless you had done a thing.
— Mikidady Selungwi
A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.
— Eknath Easwaran, Take Your Time: How to Find Patience, Peace, and Meaning
When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly.
— David Mitchell, Slade House
One reason for this polarisation is that, as a group, people can come up with a bigger set of persuasive arguments in support of the biased options: because everyone favours leaving the job, everyone suggests reasons to do so. But they come up with slightly different reasons. One person may point out that your friend is unlikely to get promoted any more at the bank, another that a new job would mean he’d meet new people, another that he never has the chance to travel in his current job and so on. So by the end of the discussion, all the group’s talked about is a lot of good reasons in favour of one option. As a result, the group agrees on a more extreme conclusion based on this surfeit of good reasons.
— Daniel Richardson, Social Psychology for Dummies
He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger (in the sense of psychological hygiene) is the psychological counterpart of the bends. Just as the physical health of the caisson worker would be endangered if he left his diver's chamber suddenly (where he is under enormous atmospheric pressure), so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
I don’t like psychiatrists,” Alecto told her. “Not because they don’t think I’m real, but because they have no idea what they’re doing.
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Although psychoanalysts, including Freud, tended to acknowledge sexual trauma as tragic and harmful (Freud, 1905b, 1917), the subject seems to have been too awful to consider seriously in civilized company. One notable exception, Sandor Ferenczi, presented a paper entitled “Confusion of Tongues between the Adult and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1955), to the Psychoanalytic Congress in 1932. In this presentation he talked about the helplessness of the child when confronted with an adult who uses the child’s vulnerability to gain sexual gratification. Ferenczi talked with more eloquence than any psychiatrist before him about the helplessness and terror experienced by children who were victims of interpersonal violence, and he introduced the critical concept that the predominant defense available to children so traumatized is “identiﬁcation with aggressor.” The response of the psychoanalytic community seems to have been one of embarrassment, and the paper was not published in English until 1949, 17 years after Ferenczi’s death (Masson, 1984).
— Matthew J. Friedman, Handbook of PTSD: Science and Practice
To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived.
— M. Scott Peck
Be an informed advocate and support.
— Asa Don Brown
You can’t change your past, but you can begin your journey by understanding it.
— Michelle Skeen, Love Me, Don't Leave Me: Overcoming Fear of Abandonment and Building Lasting, Loving Relationships
The field of human relations in Freud’s sense is similar to the market—it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
[T]here are two races of men in this world, but only these two -- the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Freedom" -- we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Not to take one's own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture.
— Alice  Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.
— Alice  Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
The psyche’s attachment to the brain, i.e., its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe. … It is not only permissible to doubt the absolute validity of space-time perception; it is, in view of the available facts, even imperative to do so.
— C.G. Jung
It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else.
— C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
The proper management of one's feelings clearly lies along a complex (and therefore not simple or easy) balanced middle path, requiring constant judgment and continuing adjustment. Here the owner treats his feelings (slaves) with respect, nurturing them with good food, shelter and medical care, listening and responding to their voices, encouraging them, inquiring as to their health, yet also organizing them, limiting them, deciding clearly between them, redirecting them and teaching them, all the while leaving no doubt as to who is the boss. This is the path of healthy self-discipline.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
Psychotherapy isn't a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process.
— Patricia Love, The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life
Cruelty is the opposite of love, and its traumatic effect, far from being reduced, is actually reinforced if it is presented as a sign of love.
— Alice  Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The public forum is not, of course, the most helpful place to conduct a profitable confrontation with one's parents. If we are to allow the feelings of childhood to be revived, we need an enlightened witness and not the pent-up, undigested hatred of formerly abused children who, as adults, totally identify with the perpetrators. To expose oneself defenselessly to public view while harboring such feelings from childhood can amount to a kind of self-inflicted punishment, something one seeks when, in spite of everything, one still feels guilty at having expressed the criticism and is prepared to accept hate reactions as a well deserved punishment.
— Alice  Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
One of the most influential aspects of people's psychology is how they perceive the world around them and how they relate to it.
— Pearl Zhu, CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It
Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.
— James Hillman
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, 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.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
That you find Kierkegaard "frightful" has warmed the cockles of my heart. I find him simply insupportable and cannot understand, or rather, I understand only too well, why the theological neurosis of our time has made such a fuss over him. You are quite right when you say that the pathological is never valuable. It does, however, cause us the greatest difficulties and for this reason we learn the most from it.
— C.G. Jung
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, 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.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of though, true or false, 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.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgement 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 judgement.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
In studying the psychological significance of a religious or political doctrine, we must first bear in mind that the psychological analysis does not imply a judgement concerning the truth of the doctrine one analyzes. This latter question can be decided only in terms of the logical structure of the problem itself.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
The truth, a truth, and reality are not always the same.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Circle of Trust
They were more free, but they were more alone.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Sometimes the closer you are to the truth, the harder it is to see.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Circle of Trust
All human behaviour, language, thoughts, feelings, actions, and consciousness emerge from this massively interconnected network of neurons. Each neuron is pretty dumb; it either fires in a certain situation or it doesn’t, but out of this mass dumbness comes great cleverness.
— Trevor Harley
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
— Erich Fromm
I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober.
— Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
But who knows why we really do anything? Who knows why we do what we do when we do it? Why your local barista greeted you with a curt 'hi' instead of her usual, mellifluous-sounding 'hello' has a trillion justifications. So, why someone decides to commit suicide might take a while to explain, and a lifetime to begin comprehending...
— Samuel Armen, Within a Diminishing Caricature
The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.
— Samuel Armen, Within a Diminishing Caricature
When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.
— John Tsilimparis, Retrain Your Anxious Brain: Practical and Effective Tools to Conquer Anxiety
Only those person who learned to like themselves can be generous and friendly with others.
— Les Giblin, The Art Of Dealing With People
To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
She spoke to him of her problems, and that made him forget his own. She told him that he was intelligent, thoughtful, becoming, and deeply magnetic - everything he wanted so badly for her to see in him. Attention is the greatest gift when you're too afraid to pay it to yourself, the wind ruminates.
— Samuel Armen, Within a Diminishing Caricature
Relationships must be fostered as far as possible and maintained, and thus a morbid transference can be avoided.
— Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Pages 1-5.
All of material and All of any services can be purchased, with the exception of, Love, Peace and Joy, they are not for sale at any price
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
Real communication occurs...when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.
— Carl Rogers
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Experimental studies consistently point out that the popular remedy for anger, ventilation, is really worse than useless. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: expressing anger tends to make you even angrier and solidifies an angry attitude.
— Judith McKay, When Anger Hurts: Quieting the Storm Within
When you love someone you have chosen to relinquish a part of yourself in order to inherit a part of them, and what perpetuates that love is the feeling of confident appreciation for such a potentially debilitating trade. That's why heartbreak feels like a sudden void.
— Samuel Armen, Within a Diminishing Caricature
For all the normal people who make fun of the mentally ill it's spelled K.A.R.M.A. and it's pronounced your days coming, Bitch!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
If others are judgmental and do not appreciate your life's work, don't be dejected. Try to see the incapability of others who are unable to understand the things you understand, and appreciate the capability of seeing something which is not visible to others.
— Ashish Mandlik
If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, belittle them. It's better to be an asshole than look stupid.
— John LeFevre, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals
When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.
— Loretta Graziano Breuning, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin,  Endorphin Levels
You think with your body, not with your brain.
— Daniel Kahneman
Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.
— Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore
A lizard never thinks something is wrong with the world, even as it watches its young get eaten alive. It doesn't tell itself "something is wrong with the world," because it doesn't have enough neurons to imagine the world being other than what it is. It doesn't expect a world in which there is no predators, so it doesn't condemn the world for falling short of expectations. it doesn't condemn itself for failing to keep its offspring alive. Humans expect more, and we do something about it. That's why we end up focused on our disappointments instead of saluting our accomplishments.
— Loretta Graziano Breuning, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin,  Endorphin Levels
It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.
— Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon
Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.
— Daniel M. Gilbert
Because of language, the thoughts we record today might reach into the future to influence the thinking of people not yet born.
— Laura A. Freberg, Discovering Psychology: The Science of Mind
The only way to go back in time is by moving into the future
— Waqas Bin Ehsan
When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.
— Candace B. Pert, Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.
— Mark R. Leary
There's no point in fighting for a woman that is rude and boring, just because she's hot. Such woman shortens your lifespan.
— Daniel Marques
Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
But I'll tell you secret. Something even a lot of grownups haven't figured out yet,' Miss Taylor leaned forward and whispered 'When we face our fears, we take their power away.
— Bobby  Nelson, The Mannequins
All men are troublesome but some are more troublesome than others.All women are troubles although, some are more of a trouble than others.
— Prinx Maurice
Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.
— Criss Jami
A psychologist’s job (if it’s done well) is to get you to seriously laugh at yourself.
— Clifford Cohen
Brains are like toddlers. They are wonderful and should be treasured, but that doesn't mean you should trust them to take care of you in an avalanche or process serotonin effectively.
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.
— Jonathan Haidt
But in practice, every psychological confession has religious significance, and every religious confession, whether ritual and sacramental or free, its psychological effects. It is perhaps in this fact that we perceive most clearly the unity of the human being, and how impossible it is to dissociate the physical, psychological and religious aspects of his life. Every doctor, even without specializing in psychotherapy, in so far as he has understanding of what is human and likes contact with human beings, may suddenly find himself promoted to a confessor's priesthood without having sought it.
— Paul Tournier, Guilt And Grace
Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too farwith thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their mostextreme consequence.
— Herman Koch
And The Monster Said "Pity The Broken Child As In You Pity The Insane
— The Monster Pyro
Jealousy is the opposite of maintaining and growing in a relationship. Jealousy includes elements of fear, anger, suspicion, and control that have no place in a mature relationship.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Regardless the options you have, the most important thing is to choose consciously. Don't let ancient religious programming dictate your emotional and intellectual responses. You are a biological and social creature living in a biological and social world. Recognizing this gives you the power to make more rational decisions about how you want to enjoy the only life you have.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
And The Ucontrolled One Said "If I Am Weird Then You Are Not Normal
— The Monster Pyro
And The Monster Said "Yes But No Being That Can Cause Such Destruction Without Remorse Can Consider Itself A Person
— The Monster Pyro
And The Librarian Said "Earth Is Just A Fat Kid Being Kept Alive By Machines That Feed Him More Until It Explodes, I Recommend Temporary Starvation
— The Monster Pyro
All evil seems to arise from the desire to dominate others. Most men in our society are taught from a very early age to try to dominate. It isn’t something that they think about consciously. It operates at a subconscious level. They are taught by the adults around them and their peers. Someone dominates them and they in turn try to dominate others. They do it without even realizing it and they do it without even thinking about why. It is without question. In their conscious awareness they may aspire to grandiose ideals but their actions speak for what really motivates them from a subconscious level.
— Mark Alberto Yoder Nunez, The Spider Lady and Other Short Stories and Poetry
It’s better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Art of Neuroscience in Everything
Whoever challenges freaks should noticethat in the method he does not mature into a beast.
— Santosh Kalwar
People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
— Idries Shah, Thinkers of the East
Religious persons are generally very interested in sex just like any normal person - and have an imagination and the energy for it. When constrained by the guilt cycle, however, they keep it under wraps. When guilt is temporarily removed, they can go to the other extreme. Many can remain in the uninhibited phase for weeks - months at most - then a wave of guilt overtakes them.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Acknowledgement of the prevalence and impact of trauma challenges psychological theories that localize dysfunction within the individual while ignoring the contribution of social forces on adjustment (Brett, 1996; Ross, 2000).
— Rachel E. Goldsmith
Who can understand the covert world of the emotions, the secret life of the mind?
— Roberta Parry, Killing Time
And The Monster Said "Define Morality" Later To Explain That It Depends On The Person If They Are A Person.....
— The Monster Pyro
As cliché as it might sound, I'd rather lose than win by cheating. The latter is a much deeper, more personal loss in that one is admittedly whispering to himself his lack of competence. His cheating then begets more cheating, as he is ever-privately, ever-subconsciously insulting himself; thus, gradually deteriorating any remaining confidence.
— Criss Jami
It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.
— Idries Shah, Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
Being good or being evil is not something that is inherent in our nature over which we have no control, rather we define ourselves by the choices we make, moment by moment, situation by situation. All it takes is an act of will to be the best that we can be.
— Laurence Overmire, The One Idea That Saves The World: A Call to Conscience and A Call to Action
You're FAT - and don't try to sugarcoat it, because you'll just eat that, too.
— Phillip C. McGraw
There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She’d wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naïve at times, she wasn’t stupid.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
These are our neighbours, our co-workers, friends' children... the problem is closer than you think, but so is the solution.
— Phillip C. McGraw
...we are a narrative, storytelling species. Revealing our own histories, and understanding those of others can really help us appreciate the humanity in all of our fellow individuals.
— Stephen P. Hinshaw, Origins of the Human Mind
If you don't know when you're good, how can you know when you're bad?
— Will Adolphy
The college bookstore was a splash of life, culture, and society. As a psychology student, I often found myself intrigued by the behavior, ways of thinking and feeling, and general schemata of others, and this was the perfect spot to engage my senses.Other times, I was just annoyed.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
The Eternal Smiler strode forth, handing her one, as well. I considered the psychology behind her smile and formed the conclusion that, despite its obvious coating of pleasantry, it was an understandable psychological decision.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
A fresh approach is needed — an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour
— Jeremy Griffith, Freedom: The End of the Human Condition
People who understand human behavior and personality tend to find flaws in every next person they meet, analyze their actions and develop bit sociopath nature.
— Himmilicious
A society whose members are helpless need idols.
— Erich Fromm, Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought
Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.
— Idries Shah
Real love will take you far beyond yourself
—  and therefore real love will devastate you.
Treating depression often requires that a patient identifies and changes self-defeating thinking. Identifying religion as the problem is especially difficult, since people often retreat to religion to deal with their depression. In reality, however, while religion promises peace and fulfillment, it often creates more of what caused the depression in the first place.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Any relationship involves a power exchange. A free flow of power allows everybody involved to contribute and get their respective needs met. In a patriarchal religious marriage, power is hierarchical: men are dominant, and women are subservient, causing a serious disruption in the natural flow of power between the mates.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Normal people redirect their sexual energy all the time, but religion takes that skill and hijacks it. Religion says, "No, you cannot do that, that is sinful. Direct energy toward god."Sexual desire does not disappear with increased religiosity and activity. Instead, it gets redirected but the thoughts and incoming stimulation continue.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
[U]sing religion to treat depression often makes the problem worse. It's like treating the disease with more of the disease. It is effective in getting people to give time and money to the church, but it does not help the victim.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Society reproduces itself antagonistically.
— Rudolf J. Siebert
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality[,] consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than an abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.“Psychoanalysis and sociology.” Pp. 37-39 inCritical theory and society: A reader, edited by S. Bronner and D. Kellner. New York: Routledge.
— Erich Fromm
Taking guilt out of the equation allows a person to see how he is hurting himself and others and what he can do about it. Eliminating guilt about sex allows a person to talk about needs and desires more honestly and negotiate with possible partners. If a person feels shame about his desires, he is unlikely to talk about it with anyone. As long as the cycle of guilt persists, harmful behavior will likely continue.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Emotions, moods, impulses, ebb and flow with the tide of my life. Tidal waves, at times, in a bipolar mind.
— H.g.
A MOTTO OF THE HUMAN RACETell me what to do
—  but it must be what I want you to tell me.
Control Master Theory proposes that most psychological problems are the result of our altruistic impulses run amok.
— Lewis Engel, Imaginary Crimes
The best you can do as a parent is to expose your children to a wide range of religions. Rather than trying to "program them" to dislike religion, give them the tools to analyze it themselves. With the conceptual tools of critical thinking and skepticism, and adequate exposure to many religions, children are very likely eventually to conclude that all religion is crazy.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
I am an idol worshipper; for I understand what idol worship means, and the idolater does not.
— Idries Shah, The Sufis
But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -- religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals -- they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
We must accept the fact that we have distorted and constricted our lives as adults in accordance with our unconscious beliefs.
— Lewis Engel, Imaginary Crimes
Control Master Theory suggests that our psychological problems come about in much the same way: our decision to make ourselves unhappy because one or both of our parents were unhappy is just as altruistic as our friend's decision to run through flames to save his daughter.
— Lewis Engel
Psychiatry is NOT Science, it is just a game like Gematria. It is induced and applied by man and only exists in his domain while he remains alive. Since man is NO god, he possesses NOT the power over his mechanics – including Psychology, and hence, his Biology is subjugated to the Laws of Science as an exterior influence whether he likes it or not.
— Ibrahim Ibrahim, Quotable: My Worldview
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
— C.S. Lewis
In light of religious teachings on sex, unrestricted people often feel they are fundamentally flawed. They are sinful and rebellious against god for having strong urges that go against the church's teachings. If the religious belief is deep enough, a person will not be able to look at his behavior rationally. The result can be a destructive cycle beginning with some religiously prohibited sexual behavior followed by repentance and prayer for a few weeks. Soon biological urges surface again, and he goes back to the behavior, followed by repentance once more. The process keeps him focused on guilt, not on rational ways to enjoy and express sexuality. Every time he goes through the cycle, it makes him feel less worthwhile. At the same time, the only way he can get relief is by going back to his religion.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The religious guilt cycle interferes with learning and change. Rather than learning who he is as a sexual being, he measures himself against an impossible religious sexual standard and always comes up short. Absent religion, many unrestricted people can deal with their behavior in a rational manner.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.
— Alice  Miller
The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.
— Idries Shah, The Sufis
What are the differences between computer and humanity??If computer get hot, there is a fan for the computer. If a man get hot, which will mean to much information in head, the humanity start to masturbate!But the question is why computer have one fan and humanity have two hands??It's simple as that!Fan can be replaced, but one hand can't be replaced if it's broken, so it's gave one more if you have problem with the one to use the other. Take it as a gift!
— Deyth Banger
Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope.
— Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance.
— Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
There is only one state- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
the desperate need to belong is perhaps never as great as during adolescence. Advertisers seek to communicate with teenagers by frequently using that powerful appeal.
— Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
We must love those close to us, all the time, every day. Moments only happen once. Make them matter.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Life is ephemeral; each moment passes quickly, a blur of color on a fast moving subway car. There and gone and all we are left with is the imprint of what once was.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn