Quotations About Psychology

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


Depression is rage spread thin. ~George Santayana


Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. ~Voltaire


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


To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness. ~Fyodor Dostoevski


Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. ~Thomas Wolfe


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


To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. ~Fritz Perls


A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work. ~Geoffrey Norman


Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression. ~Dodie Smith