PSYCHOLOGY QUOTES
quotations about psychology
It is a principle of modern psychology that the feelings most apt to influence behavior are those that we try hardest to suppress.
THEODORE ROSZAK
The Gendered Atom
The practical basis of the medical profession rested on psychology. Everyone felt better when self-confident, expensive experts could be called in to handle a vital emergency. Doctors relieved others of the responsibility for deciding what to do. As such, their role was strictly comparable to that of the priesthood, whose ministrations to the soul relieved anxieties parallel to those relieved by medical ministrations to the body.
WILLIAM HARDY MCNEILL
Plagues and Peoples
The world of psychology contains looks and tones and feelings; it is the world of dark and light, of noise and silence, of rough and smooth; its space is sometimes large and sometimes small, as everyone knows who in adult life has gone back to his childhood's home; its time is sometimes short and sometimes long, it has no invariables. It contains all the thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, volitions that you naturally ascribe to mind.
E. B. TITCHENER
A Beginner's Psychology
I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.
ALAN MOORE
Watchmen
It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences.
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD
Philosophy of Mind: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology
Psychology should be the chief basic science upon which the practices of education depend. It should have supplied education with the information it needs concerning the processes of understanding, learning, and thinking, among other things. One of the difficulties has been that such theory as has been developed has been based primarily upon studies of behavior of rats and pigeons. As someone has said, some of the theory thus developed has been an insult even to the rat.
J. P. GUILFORD
The Nature of Human Intelligence
We are virtuoso exploiters of not so much a theory as a craft. That is, we might better call it a folk craft rather than a folk theory. The theory of folk psychology is the ideology about the craft, and there is lots of room, as anthropologists will remind us, for false ideology.
DANIEL CLEMENT DENNETT
Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds
The biggest misconception about psychology is that it is not rigorous enough to tackle the big, "important" questions because its methods as a field are limited. While psychology continues to be an important source of insights about human nature and potential, as a young and growing science it faces pressure from all sides to prove its worth.
ANGELA MEDVEDEVA
"Interview with Angela Medvedeva", Times Higher Education, January 19, 2017
Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
RUDOLPH ARNHEIM
Parables of Sun Light
According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Human psychology is hideously complex, and the various ways that people depart from rationality don't tend to fit together into a simple, measurable theory.
NOAH SMITH
"Behavioral Economics Isn't Dead Yet", Bloomberg, January 25, 2017
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored.
OSCAR WILDE
The Ideal Husband
Cancer has the biopsy, kidney disease has the urine test, and HIV has the cheek swab, yet diagnosis for mental illness is often nothing more than a survey or a conversation with a psychiatrist.
TARAH KNARESBORO
"Read My Blood", Psychology Today, May 3, 2011
All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
Reflection of a Siamese Twin
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
CARL JUNG
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
MARTHA GELLHORN
Selected Letters
Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
JOHN DEWEY
The Public and Its Problems
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.
D.H. LAWRENCE
St. Mawr
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
ABRAHAM MASLOW
Motivation and Personality