Inspiring Psychology Quotes: A Curated Collection to Enlighten Your Mind

"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become."

- C.G. Jung

"The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance."

- Viktor Frankl

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

- Carl Jung

"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude."

- William James

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

- Viktor Frankl

"The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you."

- Erich Fromm

"We cannot change anything unless we accept it."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.”"

- Erich Fromm

"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do."

- Carl Jung

"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."

- Albert Ellis

"Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances."

- Viktor Frankl

"Probably the biggest insight… is that happiness is not just a place, but also a process. Happiness is an ongoing process of fresh challenges, and it takes the right attitudes and activities to continue to be happy."

- Ed Diener

"Happiness is not just a big bolt of joy from thrill rides and amusement parks, or getting the latest gadgets and games. It is unpacked and small doses of laughter with your siblings, wandering the park alone or with your pet, being a chatterbox with your pals, snuggling with loved ones on Sunday mornings, listening to your friends, without advising them, calling and connecting with ones feeling lonely, conserving even a tiny bit of energy to nature, trees, and flowers, which sustain life, standing up for others those who know or ones you don’t but are treated badly—only because they are different. And most importantly, being kind to others, because being kind to others is being kind to yourself."

- Tayyab Rashid, PhD

"Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy — it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself."

- Victor Frankl

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create."

- Buddha

"If you can change your mind, you can change your life."

- William James

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself."

- Victor Frankl

"It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not our there is that it’s inside us."

- Sonja Lyubomirsky

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."

- Carl Jung

"I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."

- Carl Jung

"I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming."

- Carl Rogers

"Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision."

- Erich Fromm

"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."

- Carl Rogers

"The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness."

- Martin Seligman, PhD

"For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

- Viktor Frankl

"Once you start making the effort to ‘wake yourself up’—that is, be more mindful in your activities—you suddenly start appreciating life a lot more."

- Robert Biswas-Diener

"We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge."

- Sigmund Freud

"The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived."

- Søren Kierkegaard

"Every person on this earth is full of great possibilities that can be realized through imagination, effort, and perseverance."

- Scott Barry Kaufmann

"When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go."

- Shawn Achor

"The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either."

- Daniel Gilbert

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

- Carl Rogers

"Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers; but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions."

- Dacher Keltner

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering."

- Viktor Frankl

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

- Carl Jung

"If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life."

- Abraham Maslow

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes."

- William James

"Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength."

- Sigmund Freud

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

- Carl Jung

"He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened."

- Lao Tzu

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

- Oscar Wilde

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

- Rumi

"Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement."

- Baltasar Gracian

"You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago."

- Alan Watts

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

- Alan Watts

"Why don’t you really know what you want? Two reasons: 1. You have it. 2. You don’t know yourself, because you never can... Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. You're always an endless mystery to yourself."

- Alan Watts

"Positivity doesn’t just change the contents of your mind … it widens the span of possibilities that you see."

- Barbara Fredrickson, PhD

"True kindness is not what drives relationships of mere utility, but it is at the core of relationships of goodness."

- Suzann Pileggi Pawelski, MAPP, and James Pawelski, PhD

"Our behavior toward others is often a reflection of our treatment of ourselves."

- Tal Ben-Shahar

"Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all."

- Erik H. Erikson

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue."

- Viktor Frankl

"Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need."

- Marshall Rosenberg

"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."

- Marsha Linehan

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

- Viktor Frankl

"If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."

- Marianne Williamson

"The good life is best construed as a matrix that includes happiness, occasional sadness, a sense of purpose, playfulness, and psychological flexibility, as well as autonomy, mastery, and belonging."

- Robert Biswas-Diener

"You don’t have to be the best at something. You just have to be the most determined."

- Lauren Burns

"When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity."

- Martin Seligman

"By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue."

- Martin Seligman

"When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates."

- Tal Ben-Shahar

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life."

- Abraham Maslow

"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying."

- B. F. Skinner

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being."

- Carl Jung

"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?"

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly 3. No exceptions."

- William James

"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it."

- William James

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

- William James

"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."

- William James

"Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude."

- William James

"Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours."

- William James

"Begin to be now what you will be hereafter."

- William James

"Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

- William James

"If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."

- Kurt Lewin

"If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride."

- Karen Horney

"Man, by his very nature and of his own accord, strives toward self-realization, and that his set of values evolves from such striving. Apparently he cannot, for example, develop his full human potentialities unless he is truthful to himself; unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others in the spirit of mutuality. Apparently he cannot grow if he indulges in a "dark idolatry of self" and consistently attributes all his own shortcomings to the deficiencies of others. He can grow, in the true sense, only if he assumes responsibility for himself."

- Karen Horney

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

- Jean Piaget

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered."

- Jean Piaget

"We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself."

- Lev Vygotsky

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves."

- Erich Fromm

"If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation."

- Erich Fromm

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."

- Erich Fromm

"The mature response to the problem of existence is love."

- Erich Fromm

"Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."

- Erik H. Erikson

"Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired."

- Erik H. Erikson

"Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all."

- Erik H. Erikson

"The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others."

- Erik H. Erikson

"In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity."

- Erik H. Erikson

"You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play."

- Erik H. Erikson

"There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding."

- Erik H. Erikson

"Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice."

- Erik H. Erikson

"No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be."

- Erik H. Erikson

"In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not."

- Carl Rogers

"The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."

- Carl Rogers

"What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly."

- Carl Rogers

"The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself."

- Carl Rogers

"I'm not perfect... But I'm enough."

- Carl Rogers

"When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me."

- Carl Rogers

"A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits."

- Carl Rogers

"Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?"

- Carl Rogers

"If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual."

- Carl Rogers

"To be with another in this [empathic] way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another's world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish."

- Carl Rogers

"Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong - yet subtle and gentle - way of being."

- Carl Rogers

"You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn."

- Milton H. Erickson

"You can teach a child the importance of pain by your behavior. You can also teach as child the importance of no pain by your behavior."

- Milton H. Erickson

"When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge."

- Milton H. Erickson

"Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage."

- Milton H. Erickson

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

- Viktor Frankl

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him."

- Erich Fromm

"Man’s main task is to give birth to himself."

- Erich Fromm

"God has put something noble and good into every heart his hand has created. So while living on earth we must always remember to learn from yesterday, live for today, and hope for tomorrow because time will only show what has mattered throughout our journey."

- Melanie Klein

"Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."

- Erich Fromm

"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult...Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship."

- Erich Fromm

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."

- Erich Fromm

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty."

- Erich Fromm

"If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

- Erich Fromm

"The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears."

- Erich Fromm

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."

- Erich Fromm

"Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love."

- Erich Fromm

"There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live."

- Karen Horney

"I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming."

- Jacques Lacan

"Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life."

- Jean Piaget

"I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped."

- Fritz Perls

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."

- Viktor Frankl

"The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt."

- Leo Buscaglia

"It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly light-hearted. Yet everyone takes the happy person for granted."

- Gretchen Rubin

"As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found — in himself."

- Erich Fromm

"Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it."

- Albert Schweitzer

"We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

- Lord Alfred Tennyson

"In the depths of midwinter I finally learned there was an invisible summer."

- Albert Camus

"Not long ago, it dawned upon me that impostor syndrome is a paradox: - others believe in you - you don’t believe in yourself - yet you believe yourself instead of them If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself?"

- Adam Grant

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

- Viktor Frankl

"Positive psychology is not a self-help movement. It is a science, with its roots in academia and its rigor sharpened by research."

- Martin Seligman

"What lies behind us and what lies before us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

- Abraham Maslow

"Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice."

- William James

"When I look at the world, I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic."

- Carl Rogers

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

- B. F. Skinner

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

- William James

"Becoming is better than being."

- Carol Dweck

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential."

- Angela Duckworth, PhD

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"There's no coming to consciousness without pain."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

- Viktor Frankl

"Gratitude has been linked with high positive emotion, optimism, life satisfaction, vitality, religiousness and spirituality, and less depression and envy than less grateful individuals."

- Ryan Niemiec, PsyD

"It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don't know what they can do."

- Milton H. Erickson

"Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking."

- Eckhart Tolle

"There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy."

- Milton H. Erickson

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society."

- Jean Piaget

"Change will lead to insight more often than insight will lead to change."

- Milton H. Erickson

"I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful."

- Carl Rogers

"True empathy is always free of any evaluative or diagnostic quality. This comes across to the recipient with some surprise. "If I am not being judged, perhaps I am not so evil or abnormal as I have thought."

- Carl Rogers

"Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I’m going to just be me—rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous."

- Carl Rogers

"The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works."

- Daniel Kahneman

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."

- Sigmund Freud

"Vulnerability is not knowing victory of defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in."

- Brené Brown

"The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust."

- Carl Rogers

"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."

- Sigmund Freud

"I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect."

- Carl Rogers

"It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits."

- Ellen J. Langer

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

- Sigmund Freud

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action."

- William James

"Be content with what you have. Rejoice in how things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking the whole world belongs to you."

- Lao Tzu

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

- William James

"To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is."

- C.G. Jung

"To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds."

- William James

"You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat."

- Carl Rogers

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination."

- Carl Rogers

"There is direction but there is no destination."

- Carl Rogers

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."

- Thomas Szasz

"We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed."

- Carl Rogers

"When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another."

- Carl Rogers

"What is most personal is most universal."

- Carl Rogers

"People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds."

- Carl Rogers

"A creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will; he must court sickness, failure, or insanity in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world's outworn fundaments and make place for a new one."

- Erik H. Erikson

"The purpose of life is to discover your gift; the work of life is to develop it; and the meaning of life is to give your gift away."

- David Viscott

"When we are open to new possibilities, we find them. Be open and skeptical of everything."

- Todd Kashdan

"My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon."

- Mizuta Masahide

"Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin."

- Ivan Pavlov

"Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong."

- Adam Grant

"With harmonious passion, the activity occupies a significant, but not overpowering, space in the person’s identity and is in harmony with other aspects of the person’s life."

- Robert Vallerand, PhD

"Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated… the body sticks to the facts."

- Alice Miller

"I don’t know what’s worse: to now know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be and feel alone."

- Daniel Keyes

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."

- Charles Dickens

"Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us."

- David Richo

"When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together."

- John Berger

"Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins."

- Harshit Walia

"We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection — which we have ourselves created."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"…the sole purpose of human experience is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."

- Carl Jung

"It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it."

- Sigmund Freud

"You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colors fill your mind."

- Jac Vanec

"Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim."

- Tyler Knott Gregson

"Recognize, appreciate and repay your parents’ love."

- Master Cheng Yen

"Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative."

- John Dewey

"Life itself remains a very effective therapist."

- Karen Horney

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

- Sigmund Freud

"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism."

- Sigmund Freud

"We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep."

- William James

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook."

- William James

"A few modern philosopher's assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before."

- Alfred Binet

"It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring."

- Alfred Adler

"Seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another."

- Alfred Adler

"To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation."

- Alfred Adler

"The highly ambitious person, in spite of all his successes, always remains dissatisfied, in the same way as a greedy baby is never satisfied."

- Melanie Klein

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

- John B. Watson

"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time."

- Anna Freud

"Lose your mind and come to your senses."

- Fritz Perls

"...nobody can stand truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable."

- Fritz Perls

"But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

- Viktor Frankl

"Life can show up no other way than that way in which you perceive it."

- Neale Donald Walsch

"The neurotic, as long as he must adhere to his illusions about himself, cannot recognize limitations, the search for glory goes into the unlimited. Because the main goal is the attainment of glory, he becomes uninterested in the process of learning, of doing, or of gaining step by step — indeed, tends to scorn it. He does not want to climb a mountain; he wants to be on the peak. Hence he loses the sense of what evolution or growth means, even though he may talk about it. Because, finally, the creation of the idealized self is possible only at the expense of truth about himself, its actualization requires further distortions of truth, imagination being a willing servant to this end. Thereby, to a greater or lesser extent, he loses in the process his interest in truth, and the sense for what is true or not true — a loss that, among others, accounts for his difficulty in distinguishing between genuine feelings, beliefs, strivings, and their artificial equivalents (unconscious pretenses) in himself and in others. The emphasis shifts from being to appearing."

- Karen Horney

"Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine."

- Fritz Perls

"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."

- Plutarch

"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."

- Sigmund Freud

"What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see."

- Jean Piaget

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge."

- Plato

"Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely."

- Jean Piaget

"Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions."

- Sigmund Freud

"There are two things in life that cannot wait: fulfilling filial piety and doing good deeds."

- Master Cheng Yen

"The universe stands aside for those people who know where they are going."

- Paulo Coelho

"My experience is what I agree to attend to."

- William James

"The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy."

- Viktor Frankl

"... anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration."

- Kurt Lewin

"Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear."

- William James

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

- Alan Watts

"To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown."

- Karen Horney

"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."

- Sigmund Freud

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."

- Carl Jung

"Sensation tell us a thing is. Thinking tell us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

- William Shakespeare

"The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"How hurtful it can be to deny one’s true self and live a life of lies just to appease others."

- June Ahern

"It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Follow your heart but take your brain with you."

- Alfred Adler

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

- William James

"A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment."

- Douglas Adams

"…But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will turn wild and cause you grief."

- Robert Greene

"People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around."

- Douglas Adams

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best."

- Paul Valéry

"The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path."

- Marcus Buckingham

"We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth."

- Virginia Satir

"Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile."

- William James

"Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching."

- Ivan Pavlov

"Experience alone does not create knowledge."

- Kurt Lewin

"Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume."

- Erich Fromm

"Nothing is more practical than a good theory."

- Kurt Lewin

"The American cultural ideal of the self-made man, of everyone standing on his own feet, is as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. We all need each other. This type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to the maturity of individual and group functioning."

- Kurt Lewin

"Our behavior is purposeful; we live in a psychological reality or living space that includes not only those parts of our physical and social environment that are important to us but also imagined states that do not currently exist."

- Kurt Lewin

"Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."

- Karen Horney

"The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place."

- Jim Butcher

"Reality denied comes back to haunt."

- Philip K. Dick

"We forget very easily what gives us pain."

- Graham Greene

"So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

- Viktor Frankl

"No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same."

- Viktor Frankl

"It is better to give than to receive."

- Marta Mendías

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

- Alan Watts

"Play is the answer to how anything new comes about."

- Jean Piaget

"To avoid the difficulties of teleological language, adaptation must be described as an equilibrium between the action of the organism on the environment and vice versa."

- Jean Piaget

"The person most in control is the person who can give up control."

- Fritz Perls

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

- William James

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

- C.G. Jung

"Learning is the discovery that something is possible."

- Fritz Perls

"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it."

- Jacques Lacan

"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think."

- Jacques Lacan

"The root of creativity is found in the need to repair the good object destroyed during the depressive phase."

- Melanie Klein

"It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health."

- Erich Fromm

"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

- Erich Fromm

"Intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most durable structural equilibrium of behaviour, is essentially a system of living and acting operations."

- Jean Piaget

"The individual acts only if he experiences a need, i.e., if the equilibrium between the environment and the organism is momentarily upset, and action tends to re-establish the equilibrium, i.e., to re-adapt the organism."

- Jean Piaget

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."

- Anna Freud

"Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned."

- Anna Freud

"According to Claparède, feelings appoint a goal for behaviour, while intelligence merely provides the means (the "technique"). But there exists an awareness of ends as well as of means, and this continually modifies the goals of action."

- Jean Piaget

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Shame is a soul eating emotion."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Play is the work of childhood."

- Jean Piaget

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."

- Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

"Teaching means to show a person that something is possible."

- Fritz Perls

"The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"Words are animals, alive with a will of their own."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?"

- Jacques Lacan

"The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The true leader is always led."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real."

- Jacques Lacan

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

- Sigmund Freud

"A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment."

- Alfred Binet

"I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you."

- Jacques Lacan

"Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an act internalized as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a re-adaptation."

- Jean Piaget

"The intelligence of an individual is not a fixed quantity."

- Alfred Binet

"...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack."

- Jacques Lacan

"When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex."

- Jacques Lacan

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."

- Alfred Adler

"It is naturally a sign of inner liberation when a patient can squarely recognize his difficulties and take them with a grain of humor. But some patients at the beginning of analysis make incessant jokes about themselves, or exaggerate their difficulties in so dramatic a way that they will appear funny, while they are at the same time absurdly sensitive to any criticism. In these instances humor is used to take the sting out of an otherwise unbearable shame."

- Karen Horney

"The collective psyche denies the present ego and, directly through this denial, creates anew. The floundering ego-particle, inundated with new, more richly adorned images, begins to re-emerge. We see this most beautifully in artistic productions."

- Sabina Spielrein

"It is true that a fact can sometimes appear to resemble an “accident,” as in the case of the apple that fell near Newton, but the accident only became a “fact” because Newton asked certain questions."

- Jean Piaget

"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement."

- Alfred Adler

"That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane."

- Erich Fromm

"The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions."

- Alfred Adler

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

- Erich Fromm

"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."

- Erich Fromm

"In young women, I find that a feeling of anxiety is normal and moves to the forefront of repressed feelings when the possibility of fulfilment of the wish first appears. It is a well-defined form of anxiety: You feel that the enemy is within; its characteristic ardour compels you, with inflexible urgency, to do what you do not want to do; you feel the end, the transient, before which you vainly may attempt to flee to an uncertain future. You might ask: Is this all? Is this the high point with nothing more beyond?"

- Sabina Spielrein

"We shall simply say then that every action involves an energetic or affective aspect and a structural or cognitive aspect, which, in fact, unites the different points of view already mentioned."

- Jean Piaget

"Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child."

- Anna Freud

"My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby's mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development."

- Melanie Klein

"One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults."

- Melanie Klein

"A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous."

- Alfred Adler

"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

- Sigmund Freud

"Logic is the mirror of thought, and not vice versa."

- Jean Piaget

"Every structure is to be thought of as a particular form of equilibrium, more or less stable within its restricted field and losing its stability on reaching the limits of the field."

- Jean Piaget

"Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise."

- Ivan Pavlov

"I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now."

- Fritz Perls

"Pride and self-hate belong inseparably together; they are two expressions of one process."

- Karen Horney

"Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases."

- Kurt Lewin

"When a dreamer substitutes another person for himself, the substitute is not less sharply differentiated than is the dreamer himself. This is merely objectively correct: Other people exist for us only when they are compatible with our own psyche; only suitable people exist for us. When the dreamer substitutes another person for himself, he doesn't care what the person in question might represent. The image occurs immediately as a condensation of different persons. To the dreamer, it depends only on the qualities of the substituted person that correspond to the fulfilment of his wish. Should the dreamer, for example, become envious of beautiful eyes, he condenses various persons with beautiful eyes into a hybrid, producing a type rather than an individual. The type, as investigations on dreams and dementia praecox illustrate, corresponds to an archaic pattern of thinking."

- Sabina Spielrein

"Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without."

- Ivan Pavlov

"A response is thus a particular case of interaction between the external world and the subject, but unlike physiological interactions, which are of a material nature and involve an internal change in the bodies which are present, the responses studied by psychology are of a functional nature and are achieved at greater and greater distances in space (perception, etc.) and in time (memory, etc.) besides following more and more complex paths (reversals, detours, etc.)."

- Jean Piaget

"A thousand plastic flowers don't make a desert bloom. A thousand empty faces don't fill an empty room."

- Fritz Perls

"This passion because it is so strong, must destroy in order to be contained within the limits of self-preservation."

- Sabina Spielrein

"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."

- Sigmund Freud

"Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane."

- John B. Watson

"I could not think without writing."

- Jean Piaget

"You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?"

- Fritz Perls

"No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time."

- Karen Horney

"Social action, just like physical action, is steered by perception."

- Kurt Lewin

"The universe will change if you bring up your children, not in the freedom of the libertine, but in behavioristic freedom."

- John B. Watson

"Even though godlike in his imagination, he still lacks the earthy self-confidence of a simple shepherd."

- Karen Horney

"Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try and penetrate the mystery of their origin."

- Ivan Pavlov

"The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved."

- John Bowlby

"It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other."

- Melanie Klein

"What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self."

- John Bowlby

"Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers."

- Jacques Lacan

"I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being."

- Jacques Lacan

"But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia."

- Jacques Lacan

"Learn, compare, collect the facts!"

- Ivan Pavlov

"Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit."

- Ivan Pavlov

"Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives)."

- Jean Piaget

"There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore, I must destroy you."

- Jacques Lacan

"The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom."

- Jacques Lacan

"The real is what resists symbolization absolutely"

- Jacques Lacan

"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."

- Alfred Adler

"The anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct."

- Melanie Klein

"Absence destroys small passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes tapers and kindles fires."

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves."

- Anna Freud

"Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother."

- Melanie Klein

"Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be."

- Anna Freud

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

- Carl Gustav Jung

"The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves."

- John B. Watson

"the normal or the usual is requisite for any understanding of the abnormal or the unusual."

- Milton H. Erickson

"For to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."

- John Bowlby

"It is characteristic of the emotions of the very young infant that they are of an extreme and powerful nature."

- Melanie Klein

"I would rather see the behavior of one white rat observed carefully from the moment of birth until death than to see a large volume of accurate statistical data on how 2,000 rats learned to open a puzzle box."

- John B. Watson

"A perfectly normal person is rare in our civilization."

- Karen Horney

"You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success - none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here."

- Ram Dass

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

- Tom Robbins

"No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind."

- John B. Watson

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

"Be so happy that, when other people look at you, they become happy too."

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world."

- Unknown

"Thus, we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root."

"Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences."

"The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing."

"A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow."

"Through others we become ourselves."

"The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider"

"By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own."

"Language is the tool of the tools."

"When you forgive others you dignify yourself."

"The individual becomes for himself what he is in himself through what he manifests for others."

"Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things."

"Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him."

"Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act according to the line of greatest resistance."

"Internal and external action are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action."

"Love for a cause not applause. Live to express, not to impress. Live by choice, not by chance. Make changes, not excuses. Be motivated, not manipulated. Work to excel, not to compete. Listen to your inner voice For therein lies the answer to life worth living."

"It will happen but it will take time."

"A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour."

"The internalization of socially rooted historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology."

"Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun in a drop of water"

"I have no intention of dying. In fact, that will be the last thing I do!"