c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Chances are, when you were young, you were told, in effect, "Listen, kid, here is the news: life is not about you. Life is not about what you want. What you want is not important. Life is about doing what others expect of you." If you accepted this idea, later on you wondered what had happened to your fire. Where had your enthusiasm for living gone?
— Nathaniel Branden
All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering
— Stefan Molyneux
My psychiatrist said I had charisma so at least I'm certified
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
As you look back on your life, you will often realize that many of the times you thought you were being rejected from something good, you were in fact being redirected to something better. You can’t control everything. Sometimes you just need to relax and have faith things will work out. Let go and just let life happen the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes the outcomes you can’t change end up changing you and helping you grow mentally, emotionally or spiritually.When things fall apart, consider the possibility that life knocked them down for a reason. It was not to punish you, but to prompt you to build something better to fit your personality and your purpose. Sometimes things fall apart so better things can fall together.
— John Geiger
Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.
— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
One of the most momentous, yet all but invisible, psychological changes in human history has been the intensification of a sense of insecurity and alienation from the world around us that arose when we became no longer able easily to get food in a few hours just by gathering it, or hunting it, but had to organize ourselves in a purposeful fashion simply to survive. This change is undocumented, though occasional clues can be gained about it from the comments of the few still alive who have lived through a version of it, such as old Australian Aboriginals. Its essence is subjection to a pervasive but unacknowledged, indeed unnamed, fear. It is the foundation of civilization.
— Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
— Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer
As it almost always was when I'd been too self-centered to see the truth of the matter, I felt impossibly foolish.
— Jaida Jones, Havemercy
Paradoxically, in descending into the depths of the unconscious in order to deal with the prima materia of the shadow, we are simultaneously on the path of ascending to the truly real, as we become introduced to the higher-dimensional light worlds of spirit.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
When you come to the ultimate experience in meditation, when you come to your deepest core, you are no one. You are a vast emptiness.You can become afraid in meditation, because the deeper you go in meditation, the more you realize that you are nobody, a nothingness. It is a death of the ego. That is why people become afraid of meditation.
— Swami Dhyan Giten
There is no talking rationally, using logic or facts, with someone under the spell of the psychic epidemic, as their ability to reason and to use discernment has been disabled and distorted in service to the psychic pathogen which they carry.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
We are currently in the midst of the greatest epidemic sickness known to humanity.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity's inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate in our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this most important topic before this virulent madness destroys us.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Trauma is a unique phenomenon all on its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
When the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just within an individual but collectively, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
To be a success you need to have persistence of drive, persistence of vision, and persistence of action. You will be doing yourself a disservice by not staying resilient.
— Meghan Wier, Confessions of an Introvert: The Shy Girl's Guide to Career, Networking and Getting the Most Out of Life
All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look. As we teach what we learn, I am in essence talking to myself.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
The ego isn't a bad thing. If we didn't develop a strong ego, a strong sense of self, we wouldn't be able to relate to and engage with the extremely powerful and archetypal forces (both dark and light) of the unconscious. If we don't have a strongly developed sense of self (even though it is not, ultimately speaking, the true self), we will get overwhelmed and taken over by the powers of the unconscious such that we will compulsively act them out.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talking about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advance, they are master manipulators.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nation-state, or world-system, and exploits that system, knocking it off balance.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'.
— Raymond Cattell, The Scientific Analysis of Personality
We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive.
— Stefan Molyneux
Indigenous people have been tracking the same 'psychic virus' for many centuries, calling it 'wetiko' in Cree (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan), a term that refers to a biologically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by means of evil acts.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
In order for our minds to comprehend something, there must be an appropriately structured neural structure called a 'frame' that makes it possible to contextualize, make proper sense of, and mentally 'see' the thing. Our understanding of the world is frame dependent: frames are the accessories with which we think. Frames are the cognitive, conceptual structures that enable us to put together, amplify, and activate ideas. When truth is unseen it is because it is both unframed and unnamed; frames and names go together.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously--intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (among ourselves), collectively (as a species), as well as trans-personally (in a realm beyond our personal selves). Those afflicted with wetiko consume, like a cannibal, the life force of others--human and nonhuman--for private purposes or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Evil devastates any possibility of an intellectual response
—  the tools of the rational intellect are as helpless incoping with the aftereffects of evil as it was in preventing it.
Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Wetiko doesn't objectively exist, and yet, at the same time, it is not merely our projection or imagination. Instead of an either/or universe, where phenomena like wetiko are either real or unreal, there is an area in between in which it is both/and--both real and unreal at the same time.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that had become too brutally contradictory to sustain otherwise.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A month later he was back in France, this time for an extended stay.The optimistic dawn of his revolutionary adventures was coming to an end, and his dark night of the soul was about to begin.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocratic fad: Mesmer (by this stage long gone to Germany and Switzerland) had made a fortune from the nobility, charged the huge fee of 100 livres for admission to his Society of Universal Harmony, and even been offered a pension for life by Marie-Antoinette.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
We are now edging across the boundary - always a porous one - between self-justification and fantasy. Matthews' story is by no means a complete fantasy: we can recognise every event. But the frame of reference is somehow shrinking, and momentous world events being rewritten around the actions of a minor player.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes and pressing on to occupy a large swathe of Belgium and threaten Holland. For Britain, this changed everything: a French republic that spread across the North Sea coast meant the entire coastline facing Britain would be in Republican hands.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being bullied by others into accepting their way of doing things. We want others to respect moral boundaries that we want to be free to ignore when it suits.
— Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True: Is There Absolute Truth?
It was Matthews, of course, for whom the verdict was the greatest disaster. Not only had he failed to escape from Bedlam, but the anomalies of the case made it highly unlikely that he would have the chance to appeal again. His family and friends had assembled an impeccable case, most of which had been ignored.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to show its dreamlike nature to us.
— Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko
Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic paranoid delusion. But in 1797 it was something that had never been encountered before, and would emerge as the baffling leitmotif of a case that was unprecedented in almost every imaginable way.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers as 'objects of charity' for centuries, and was proud of the claim that it had never turned anyone away.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
Matthews' shout of treason in the House was no random outburst of lunacy, but the last act in an astonishing adventure: one that might indeed have changed the history of Europe. But by this point there was no-one left to confirm the truth of the story. Most of the witnesses were dead, and those who were alive were not interested in talking.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.
— Stefan Molyneux
RemedyYour medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.Hazrat Ali
— Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi
There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.
— Neel Burton
...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.
— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia.
— John Katzenbach, The Analyst
When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
— Idries Shah, The Book of the Book
Families that feel together, heal together.
— Christina G. Hibbert Psy.D.
We live in a world of constant noise which captures our minds even when we are not aware of it
— Joost A.M. Meerloo
The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying. It was: 'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?
— Idries Shah, Reflections
But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.
— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean they should freely express violence? We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The "apparently normal personality" - the alter you view as "the client"You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the "real" person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not "the" person; there are other personalities to meet and work
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
Seven Rules Formulated for Teaching Arithmetic:1) Consider the situation the pupils faces.2) Consider the response you wish to connect with.3) Form the bond; do not expect it to come by miracle.4) Other things being equal, form no bond that will have to be broken.5) Other things being equal, do not form two or three bonds when one will serve.6) Other things being equal, form bonds in the way that they are required later to act.7) Favor, therefore, the situations which life itself will offer, and the responses which life itself will demand. (p. 101)
— Edward Lee Thorndike, The Psychology of Arithmetic
The person following is never in control, which she knows full well and which is exactly why she does it.
— Sara Gruen, Flying Changes
The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history. It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered.
— Stefan Molyneux
Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.
— Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
The commonest error of the gifted scholar, inexperienced in teaching, is to expect pupils to know what they have been told. But telling is not teaching. The expression of facts that are in one's mind is a natural impulse when one wishes others to know these facts, just as to cuddle and pat a sick child is a natural impulse. But telling a fact to a child may not cure his ignorance of it any more than patting him will cure his scarlet fever. (p. 61)
— Edward Lee Thorndike, Education, a First Book
Of course present knowledge of psychology is nearer to zero than to complete perfection, and its applications to teaching must therefore be often incomplete, indefinite, and insecure. The application of psychology to teaching is more like that of botany and chemistry to farming than like that of physiology and pathology to medicine. Anyone of good sense can farm fairly well without science, and anyone of good sense can teach fairly well without knowing and applying psychology. Still, as the farmer with the knowledge of the applications of botany and chemistry to farming is, other things being equal, more successful than the farmer without it, so the teacher will, other things being equal, be the more successful who can apply psychology, the science of human nature, to the problems of the school. (pp. 9-10)
— Edward Lee Thorndike, The Principles of Teaching: Based on Psychology
It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down.
— Angus J.L. Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science
Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself
— Joost A.M. Meerloo
I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.
— Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
When the intensity it takes to extricate one from a negative state is equal to or greater than the intensity that perpetuated the state, then the person can be freed of that state
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.
— Mike Jay, A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine
The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity.
— Angus J.L. Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science
I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory
The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.
— Gabor Maté
The pioneer, the creator, the explorer is generally a single, lonely person rather than a group, struggling all alone with his inner conflicts, fears, defenses against arrogance and pride, even against paranoia. He has to be a courageous man, not afraid to stick his neck out, not afraid even to make mistakes, well aware that he is, as Polanyi has stressed, a kind of gambler who comes to tentative conclusions in the absence of facts and then spends some years trying to figure out if his hunch was correct. If he has any sense at all, he is of course scared of his own ideas, of his temerity, and is well aware that he is affirming what he cannot prove.
— A.H. Maslow
After years of research, depth psychologists and others argue that each sex carries both the psychological and physical traits of the other. No man is purely masculine, just as there is no purely feminine woman. Jungian psychologists call the feminine characteristics of the male psyche the Anima; the female psyche's masculine characteristics they the Animus.  Both the Animus and Anima develop in complex fashion as the personality grows to maturity. Neither men nor women can reach psychological maturity without integrating their respective contrasexual other. A man's female elements enhance his manhood, just as a woman's male aspects enhance her womanhood.
— Douglas Gillette, Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche
The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
If there's more that you can do, then do it. If there's not more that you can do, then be content with what you're doing. But if there is despair, the despair can only be that you can do more. Because when you're doing as much as you can do, you will not feel despair. Because despair is the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing.
— Stefan Molyneux
It seems that there's a part of our psyche that doesn't know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company
— David    Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Excerpt from "The Strength in Knowing"Doubt is the archenemy of the purity of thought and it inhibits theessence of all that is
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing: The Truth Beyond Our Belief Systems and a Fresh Path to Finding Love, Peace and Joy
The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured
— Idries Shah, The World of the Sufi: An Anthology of Writings about Sufis and Their Work
What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Scientific Man and the Bible'. By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...
— H.L. Mencken, American Mercury
The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality
— Robert W. Firestone
There are people who fantasize about suicide, and paradoxically, these fantasies can be soothing because they usually involve either fantasizing about others' reactions to one's suicide or imagining how death would be a relief from life's travails. In both cases, an aspect of the fantasy is to exert control, either over others' views or toward life's difficulties. The writer A. Alvarez stated, " There people ... for whom the mere idea of suicide is enough; they can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided they know they have their own, specially chosen means of escape always ready..." In her riveting 2008 memoir of bipolar disorder, Manic, Terri Cheney opened the book by stating, "People... don't understand that when you're seriously depressed, suicidal ideation can be the only thing that keeps you alive. Just knowing there's an out--even if it's bloody, even if it's permanent--makes the pain bearable for one more day."This strategy appears to be effective for some people, but only for a while. Over longer periods, fantasizing about death leaves people more depressed and thus at higher risk for suicide, as Eddie Selby, Mike Amestis, and I recently showed in a study on violent daydreaming. A strategy geared toward increased feelings of self-control (fantasizing about the effects of one's suicide) "works" momentarily, but ultimately backfires by undermining feelings of genuine self-control in the long run.
— Thomas E. Joiner, Myths About Suicide
Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances.
— Richard Carlson, You Can Be Happy No Matter What: Five Principles for Keeping Life in Perspective
Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality
Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean
—  you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand
Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short.
— Hermann Ebbinghaus, Psychology; An Elementary Text-Book
Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
— Gordon W. Allport
It is evident, therefore, that one of the most fundamental problems of psychology is that of investigating the laws of mental growth. When these laws are known, the door of the future will in a measure be opened; determination of the child's present status will enable us to forecast what manner of adult he will become.
— Lewis Terman
It is our ability to forget our problems, through the process of thought, rather than the passage of time, that frees us from the circumstances of our past.
— Richard Carlson, You Can Be Happy No Matter What: Five Principles for Keeping Life in Perspective
IT IS NOT ABOUT SYMPATHY OR LIKEABILITY, EITHER. EMPATHY IS ABOUT THE TRANSLATION OF FEELING.
— Film Crit Hulk!, Screenwriting 101 by Film Crit Hulk!
Common human experience alone is no guarantee with which we can build a science of psychology.
— Wolfgang Köhler
Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.
— Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out
Dr. Webb says that losing a sibling is oftentimes much harder for a person than losing any other member of the family. "A sibling represents a person's past, present, and future," he says. "Spouses have each other, and even when one eventually dies, they have memories of a time when they existed before that other person and can more readily imagine a life without them. Likewise, parents may have other children to be concerned with--a future to protect for them. To lose a sibling is to lose the one person with whom one shares a lifelong bond that is meant to continue on into the future.
— John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
A bulimic person's shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anything or anyone. When that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish that others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without her having to ask for anything. To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food, rather than relationships, for comfort".
— Sheila M. Reindl, Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia
We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.
— William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside
A bulimic person may be so disconnected from her experience that she does not even know what she needs or wants. If she does not know, needing something or someone only confirms her sense that she is weak and inadequate. She believes her needs are not legitimate, and therefore finds it difficult to seek care or engage with any care she does manage to seek. In fact, she is likely to greet others' expressions of concern with contempt, the very contempt with which she views herself".
— Sheila M. Reindl, Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia
We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It’s a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning.
— Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
— Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
What daily life is like for “a multiple” Imagine that you have periods of “lost time.” You may find writings or drawings which you must have done, but do not remember producing. Perhaps you find child-sized clothing or toys in your home but have no children. You might also hear voices or babies crying in your head. Imagine that you can never predict when you will be able to have certain knowledge or social skills, and your emotions and your energy level seem to change at the drop of a hat, and for no apparent reason. You cannot understand why you feel what you feel, and, if you are in therapy, you cannot explore those feelings when asked. Your life feels disjointed and often confusing. It is a frightening experience. It feels out of control, and you probably think you are going crazy. That is what it is like to be multiple, and all of it is experienced by the ANPs. A multiple may also experience very concrete problems, even life-threatening ones.
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express and meet her needs and desires without directly asking for anything".
— Sheila M. Reindl, Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia
I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world.If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered?Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment
— Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy
No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.
— Cus D'Amato
Since when did psychiatry become one big, fat Myspace survey?
— Nenia Campbell, Tantalized
When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge
— Idries Shah, The Book of the Book
When you’ve had a psychotic breakdown it’s always so difficult making that decision. You meet someone new and you wonder how much you should tell them? You wonder what that person’s threshold of ‘strange’ is, and at what point in my story would I end up driving them away. That fear it’s always there in the back of your mind. Those details you never really even admitted to yourself, but that somehow have to be told just as much as they have to be buried deep down.
— Cyma Rizwaan Khan, I See The Devil
Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to years. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do it's eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine
— Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy
It's Unfair to be fair,For Life is unfair
— Farley Maglaya
Untraumatized people have a natural instinct to make healthy decisions in the best interest of their true selves. They are only limited by their immaturity and the brokenness of their external world.
— Daniel Mackler
Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Galton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators. Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.
— Michael Salter, Organised  Sexual Abuse
Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better.
— Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
I hate it that she has so insinuated herself into the interstices of my mind that I can never root her out. And most of all, I hate that at the end of my life I feel compelled to ask, "How'd I do, Mama?".
— Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy
The placebo effect has an evil twin known as the nocebo effect. This is when the expectation of harm or pain becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, even in the absence of any known physical effect. One candidate for the nocebo effect is the discomfort some people report experiencing after using mobile phones. Scientists have failed to identify a physical cause, so it's possible the adverse effects are caused by negative beliefs about the technology.
— Christian Jarrett, 30-Second Psychology
To a certain degree,We all seek, life’s purpose and meaning,love, peace and joy,and knowledge, wealth and power…
— I. Alan Appt
I'll see it when I believe it
— Thane Pittman
We need dualities or opposites to appreciate, understandand recognize value and distinction in our lives. If we did not have bitter, we could not appreciate sweet....
— I. Alan Appt
Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations. (157)
— Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
But dividing the mind into “biological” and “psychological” is as fallacious as classifying light as a particle or a wave. The natural world makes no promise to align itself with preconceptions that humans find parsimonious or convenient. (167)
— Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
The emotional mind likewise transcends the facile and appealing dualism separating its psychological and biological aspects. Physical mechanisms produce one’s experience of the world. Experience, in turn, remodels the neurons whose chemoelectric messages create consciousness. Selecting one strand of that eternal braid and assigning it primacy is the height of capriciousness. (168)
— Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
— Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
— Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves