4,465 Quotes About Psychology

In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics [...]. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared.

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.

Patience is the food of understanding.

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.

The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition.

Everything 'happens'. People can 'do' nothing. From the time we are born to the time we die things happen, happen, happen, and we think we are doing. This is our normal state in life, and even the smallest possibility to do something comes only through the work, and first only in oneself, not externally.