Psychology Quotations

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, on leaving psychotherapy

If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology. ~D.H. Lawrence

There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that. ~Mignon McLaughlin

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises. ~Sigmund Freud

Sure you can psychoanalyze! But as Baehr used to say, why bother to sort garbage?~Martin H. Fischer

Thoughts shut up want air,
And spoil, like bales unopen’d to the sun.
~Edward Young

Work cure is the best of all psychotherapy, in my opinion…. As well might we expect a patient to recover without food as to recover without work…. The sound man needs work to keep him sound, but the nervous invalid has an even greater need of work to draw him out of his isolation, and to stop the miseries of doubt and self-scrutiny, to win back self-respect and the support of fellowship. ~Richard C. Cabot

Psychology doesn’t address the soul; that’s something else. ~David Chase

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they’re complex. ~S.N. Behrman

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature. ~G.K. Chesterton

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history. ~Hermann Ebbinghaus

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. ~Jerome Lawrence

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. ~Cyril Connolly

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you’ll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years. ~Mignon McLaughlin

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. ~Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, 1943

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. ~E.M. Cioran

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected the American society within the last fifty years. ~Thomas S. Szasz

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much? ~Jason Love

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is – a vice?~Friedrich Nietzsche

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of ‘progress,’ but only by viewing history as a neurosis. ~Norman O. Brown

Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one. ~William Menninger