Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People seem to have an impressive capacity to change themselves if you believe in them, if you tell them they can and give them some help in doing so.
It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.
Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.
I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.
Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.
Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.
I try not to deal with people's hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did.
The theist is persuaded that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, still nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.
No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training.
The school-boy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning.
It should be possible, in a 'debreviation' mode, to type 'clr' on the keyboard and have 'The Council on Library Resources, Inc.' appear on the display.
I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.
Change is no modern invention. It is as old as time and as unlikely to disappear. It has always to be counted on as of the essence of human experience.
If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I'll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.
In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
Radical acceptance rests on letting go of the illusion of control and a willingness to notice and accept things as they are right now, without judging.
Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.
Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.
In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services.
The idea that beauty is unimportant or a cultural construct is the real beauty myth. We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it.
Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.
Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'
When we're awake in our bodies and sense, the world comes alive. Wisdom, creativity, and love are discovered as we relax and awaken through our bodies.
Quitting smoking can be a very good test of ones character. Pass the test and you will have accomplished so much more than just get rid of one bad habit
Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? ...a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?
In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.
Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.
Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.
Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.
The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.
Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.
We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.
Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.
Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.
All human beings have all of the intelligences. But we differ, for both genetic and experiential reasons, in our profile of intelligences at any moment.
The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.
There has been a great gulf in psychological thought between the perception of space and objects on one hand and the perception of meaning on the other.
Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.
The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.
Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.
The cynic finds love with the idealist. The rebel with the conformist. The social butterfly with the bookworm. They help each other balance their lives.