famous psychology quotes

• “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.”
• “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
• 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.          Albert Ellis
• “Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.”
• “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
• Optimism is an intellectual choice. -Diana Schneider
• I submit to you that we can train today's young psychologists who have the courage and the humanity for such work to better understand, predict, and even prevent [ethno political conflicts].  When the worst does occur, we can train psychologists to help pick up the pieces by helping people and communities heal and learn to love and trust together again. -Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., President of APA, 1998-99,  Presidential Address, American Psychologist, August 1999
• "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 things that do not work."  Thomas Edison  1847-1931This inventive genius provides us with perspective on the ways in which our efforts may not seem to provide results. Persistence in the face of disappointment is the key to success. Reframing failure in terms of efforts that "do not work" can help keep you going until you find a solution that does.
• The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.  -William James
• The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.                -Frank Lloyd Wright
• When you feel that you have reached the end and that you cannot go one step further, when life seems to be drained of all purpose: What a wonderful opportunity to start all over again, to turn over a new page.    -Eileen Caddy
• That best portion of a man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.              -William Wordsworth
• The difference between optimism and pessimism resides in memory.  The pessimist aptly recalls the hurts and failures of yesterday, but cannot remember the plentiful possibilities of a new tomorrow.  The optimist has a hopeful future already memorized.                                                                                 -Charles E. Jinks
• "Education survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten." B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
• “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.”
• Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as we                                                                                                                                 -Mary Cholmondeley
•  If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old.            -Ed Howe
• Psychology is a science that can not be pursued with the sole purpose of developing occasional experts.  Only the understanding of human nature by every human being can be its proper goal.            -Alfred Adler, M.D.- Understanding Human Nature - Chicago, 1927
• The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.                                 -James Oppenheim
• "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"              From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones
• "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1932.
• Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become.  Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be;  your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.                                         -James Lane Allen 
• If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.                                                                -Marcus Aelius Aurelius 
• You see this all the time.  A lot of women feel depressed and feel like they are failing when they have a disease. They are overwhelmed with worry and not channeling their energy into constructive pursuits like getting better. These women tend to get more episodes of inflammatory bowel disease.                  -Albert B. Knapp, MD, assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterology at New York University Medical School in New York City
• To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.                                          -Marquis De Vauvenargues
• "Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin." Ivan Pavlov   (1849-1936)
• "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  Shakespeare (Hamlet)
• "There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding." Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
• “No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.”
• "No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."           From Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905.
• "Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action."                                                                    From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, (1932)
• "The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."
• "If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning."
• "It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried." --From On Becoming a Person, 1961
• "Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."
• "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."
• I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.  Albert Ellis
• I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.                                                                                 Albert Ellis
• I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.                                                                                   Albert Ellis