4,465 Quotes About Psychology

It is, in fact, a healthy response to atomization to seek to join up with others. As humans we are social animals. We have a fundamental need to join with others to seek solutions to the problems of survival. The danger arises if, in that effort, one encounters a totalist group that seeks to isolate and control its members - then one's own survival, and potentially that of others, is put at the gravest risk.

[A] public realm that works in our fragmented society [is] one that does not yearn for an idealized past and a closed vision of community, but looks forward to an open, welcoming, safe and diverse, pluralist view of community life where children are valued, universal human rights are valued and varied cultural expressions that respect these rights are valued.

No man knows to be nice, without being a hypocrite.

The journalist Richard Neville was frighteningly accurate when, in summarising the desperate state of our species’ situation, he wrote that ‘We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’. ONLY ‘self discovery’ — this reconciling, ameliorating, psychologically healing understanding of ourselves — can save us from ‘self destruction’.

What is the world for if not to evoke and reflect back to us, as mirror, the obfuscated aspects of ourselves?

Lost and afraid in a crowd of our own alienated facets turned other, we create a cultural narrative of pure projection to try to impose some order onto the chaos

Soft as a feather but I am no angel. Fierce as a demon, but I am no evil.

It’s only through deconstructing ourselves that we are able to rebuild ourselves upon a more stable foundation of self-acceptance and go on to lead more empowered, autonomous and significant lives.

Both inferiority and superiority complexes are disempowered states of being: both states inadvertently depend upon other people to make the person feel special and worthy in some way