Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
If the handbag could think, it would have a terrific inferiority feeling, because, not having been bought, it would feel useless.
Happiness today, I think, is for most people the satisfaction of the eternal suckling: to drink in more this, that, or the other.
There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.
If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low.
The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.
Being taken for granted can be a compliment. It means that you've become a comfortable, trusted element in another person's life.
The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.
There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it.
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.
I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy.
A good rule of thumb is that any environment that consistently leaves you feeling bad about who you are is the wrong environment.
I wouldn't expect someone who's been injured to hear my side until they felt that I had fully understood the depth of their pain.
We know the speaker has received adequate empathy when a. we sense a release of tension, or b. the flow of words comes to a halt.
Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one's own convictions - not obstinately or defiantly
The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time.
The feeling that dreams show us the real nature of reality is something that's shared by many indigenous groups around the world.
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.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
Dancing with life is moving into the flow of our experiences - good or bad - with a feeling of harmony, trust, guidance and love.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.
On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.
If you let someone know you appreciate him or her, especially when you're going to disagree, it gets that person's defenses down.
A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.
Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge
Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.
I regret that I've been so busy with clinical work that I haven't been able to spend much time on experiments and outcome studies.
To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.
If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.
The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.
The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.
Men spend their whole lives showing that they're strong and silent. They fight for independence the way women struggle to connect.
I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.
Introverts like being introverts. We are drawn to ideas, we are passionate observers, and for us, solitude is rich and generative.
The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.
The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.
When we are depressed, our thinking blocks us from being aware of our needs, and then being able to take action to meet our needs.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
The goal of recovery is not to become normal. The goal is to embrace the human vocation of becoming more deeply, more fully human.
Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future.
The greatest gift that you can give to others and to yourself is time. Embrace the gift of time whether you give it or receive it.
I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.