Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all.
Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.
My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.
I think the whole point about self-control, the whole point about willpower, is to help people understand that there are endless self-nudge techniques that can be enormously helpful and are very simple.
Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self. The response is like that of a thirsty traveler who suddenly finds water in the desert - he drinks to satiation.
As a general rule, moderate levels of arousal facilitate deployment of skills, whereas high arousal disrupts it. This is especially true of complex activities requiring intricate organization of behavior
I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
Some statements concern the conscious states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner life; others concern his original and acquired ways of response, his behavior, what he is an outside observer
If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a 'pleasing personality' - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.
Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?
What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.
The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.
In Buddhism, what is known as beginner's mind is a way to look at the world as if for the first time: with interest, enthusiasm, and engagement. This may be the optimal state of mind for a healthy brain.
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school.
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.
Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may constitute a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened.
In Aristotle the mind, regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Some statements concern the conscious states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner life; others concern his original and acquired ways of response, his behavior, what he is an outside observer.
Man does work for profit in order to enjoy pain; but in a positive sense, he works to enjoy the excitement and meaning that achievement provides for his own psychological growth and thereby his happiness.
Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.
Arrogant S.O.B.s run the world. A performer can never have too much self-confidence. The best in every field are likely to strike most people as irrationally confident, but that's how they got to the top.
Well it's a drastic procedure by your standards and mine, but for the people who are living in desperation perhaps the best way to understand it is that it seems no more drastic to them than circumcision.
... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.
I think con man is the usual term. When somebody comes on television to tell a lot of needy people that God will send them to heaven if they send him $200, if that's not downright sociopathic, it's close.
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
Making a U-turn from our thoughts to our feelings re-connects us to our own inner experience and creates the grounds for connecting with others in a more authentic way. It's a movement from head to heart.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.
We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.
Overachievement is aimed at people who want to maximize their potential. And to do that, I insist you throw caution to the wind, ignore the pleas of parents, coaches, spouses, and bosses to be "realistic."
But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.
If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.
A second even more obvious sign is that the person will stop talking. If we are uncertain as to whether we have stayed long enough in the process, we can always ask, "Is there more that you wanted to say"?
Well, first of all, we did lots of studies where we show practical intelligence doesn't correlate with G. We have probably two dozen studies that practical intelligence better predicts job success than IQ.
But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.
Telling each other the truth and being who we are, and having space for the other person's vulnerability in being who they are, allows us to move in a kind of dance together that's very fluid and graceful.
Unless we're completely awake, have a degree of that. We tense against love and hold on in a way that doesn't let it flow. When that's really strong, the key piece to freeing our hearts is self-compassion.
The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin--"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.
Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.