Quotes by Psychologists - Page 19

Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: 'The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.
Bruno Bettelheim
Life stories with themes of ruin can trap us. Life stories that are triumphant can transform us.
Meg Jay
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
Abraham H. Maslow
Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present oriented.
Sonja Lyubomirsky
️Don't say "I'm a worrier and this is just who I am"!, or "I've always been a worrier, I can't help it"; instead decide from this day forward to become someone who DOESN'T worry.
Miya Yamanouchi
Because he refused to adopt a defeatist attitude, he overcame the obstacles in his path.
James C. Dobson
What can I now do to use my misfortunes constructively, to turn my suffering to advantage by finding something worthwhile to do that I could not have done so well if these tragedies had not occurred?
James C. Crumbaugh
Humility grounds a person in the realization that life is not always fair, yet it can be manageable. Genuinely humble people are psychologically secure because they do not require others to dote on them, nor do they try to position themselves for favored treatment. Even as they lay down the wish to play God, they also choose not toe allow another human to assume the position of a god over them.
Les Carter
Humble people are dignified, not because they believe their behavior can be an effective tool to control others, but because they have made dignity a part of their character.
Les Carter
It takes more than just awareness for us to change. It takes courage and humility and the willingness to occasionally feel like fools and laugh at ourselves.
Bud Harris
All of us, have our antenna up for people who might harm us in one way or another, not just people who might hurt us physically, but also for people who might treat us unfairly, take advantage of us, cheat us or fail to do their share. And we react very strongly to be misleading by other people, is part of human nature, to guard against being hurt and exploited.
Mark Leary
The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.
Jonathan Haidt
But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.
Vladas Griskevicius
The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.
Matthew D Lieberman
When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.
Jonathan Haidt
Certainly we struggle as victims of other people’s unkindness. We have been sinned against. But we cannot excuse our sinful responses to others on the grounds of their mistreatment of us. We are responsible for what we do. We are both strugglers and sinners, victims and agents, people who hurt and people who harm.
Larry Crabb
My only sin in this world has been that I have been truthful and honest and God has blessed me for this earthly sin.
Amit Abraham
Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?
Abraham H. Maslow
Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight
William James
Many people tell me that I should become a politician but I tell them no I want to do something good for the nation.
Amit Abraham
It is impossible to credit one gender with every good and perfect gift without slighting the other. That’s what extreme diversity does to us.
James C. Dobson
Pass down the good that I do unto you when you are done with it
Amit Abraham
Style is the woman herself.
Amit Abraham
A woman may be looked upon as an object for sexual satisfaction but her multifarious roles and diversified approaches make her a complex being which man has not been able to understand.
Amit Abraham
It’s really very difficult to understand a woman – actually it’s not she but he who is confused
Amit Abraham
Health is being in harmony with the world view. Health is an intuitive perception of the universe and all its inhabitants as being of one fabric. Health is maintaining communication with the animals and plants and minerals and stars. It is knowing death and life and seeing no difference. It is blending and melding, seeking solitude and seeking companionship to understand one's many levels. Unlike the more "modern" notions, in shamanic society health is not the absence of feeling; no more so is it the absence of pain. Health is seeking out all of the experiences of Creation and turning them over and over, feeling their texture and multiple meanings. Health is expanding beyond one's singular state of consciousness to experience the ripples and waves of the universe.
Jeanne Achterberg
Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more.
Miya Yamanouchi
People who help others on a regular basis are ten times more likely to be healthy than people who do not.
Arthur P. Ciaramicoli
All the happiness, health, and abundance you experience in life comes directly from your ability to love and be loved. This ability is innate, not acquired.
Robert Holden
Seventy-five percent of students visiting the Cowell Health Center at Stanford University describe themselves as “sexually active.
James C. Dobson
People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.
James W. Pennebaker
By the deficits we may know the talents, by the exceptions we may know the rules, by studying patholgoy we may construct a model of health.
Laurence Miller
If you walked into your local convenience store and bought a package of cigars, you would notice that it carries a label warning of the potential dangers of cigar smoke. Yet research suggests that cigar smoking poses a hazard only to moderate to heavy cigar smokers, who comprise less than 1 percent of the adult population. More than 97 percent of American adults, however, eat animal foods, and despite much research demonstrating the connection between the consumption of animal products and disease, we are not warned of these dangers.
Melanie Joy
Every society has the criminals that it deserves.
H. Havelock Ellis
People who do not have a price tag attached to them are priceless.
Amit Abraham
Don't value people to the extent they begin to feel they are indispensable.
Amit Abraham
Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
Jonathan Haidt
I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
Tara Brach
Some dissociative parts of the personality, living in trauma time, may experience the same emotion no matter the situation, such as fear, rage, shame, sadness, yearning and even some positive ones just as joy.
Suzette Boon
Today is felt to be the most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues.
Martha Char Love
Romantic love is the most selfish of all emotions.
Ellen Kenner
The fear of what might happen stops people but the trauma process is so beautiful and transformational. There is nothing to fear in our emotions, they will not swallow you whole - they will speak to you in profound ways.
Adele Theron
Our emotions are the continuous waves and undercurrents that enable us to flow but in some instances, when hold on to them, suppress them or repress them, or express the destructively, they disrupt the flow
Mavis Mazhura
Perhaps a better explanation for why it's so difficult to feel our feelings is that ALL emotion, positive or negative, opens the door to the nature of reality. All of us prefer to avoid pain -- but even more, we want to escape reality.
Dan B. Allender
There are three states of matter but what state one is in that matters.
Amit Abraham
But we must understand that emotions are unreliable and at times, tyrannical. They should never be permitted to dominate us.
James C. Dobson
Highs must be followed by lows
James C. Dobson
Highs must be followed by lows.
James C. Dobson
Replace fear of your own inner experience with a curious, gentle, welcoming attitude—free of judgment, self-blame, and aversion.
Melanie Greenberg
Emotions are not good, bad, right, or wrong. The first step to changing our relationship to feelings is to be curious about them and the messages they send to us.
Lane Pederson
The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don't load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
We move in response to our conversation partner’s face, and our brain also fires as we move those muscles and stirs the passions. Paralyzing the face is idiotic.
John M. Gottman
No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes "naturally" to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Christopher Ryan
Everyone gets forgotten because of Alzheimer's, ignored because of ignorance about oneself and replaced because of trying to stay in the same place.
Amit Abraham
The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.
Daniel Goleman
We all have the same 24/7. What we do with our time becomes our priority. Choose what you do with your time and do not lead a life by default
Patt Hollinger Pickett
People who own their lives do not feel guilty when they make choices about where they are going. They take other people into consideration, but when they make choices for the wishes of others, they are choosing out of love, not guilt; to advance a good, not to avoid a bad.
Henry Cloud
Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twentysomething astutely put it, "The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There's this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow.
Meg Jay
The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn't matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn't win the lottery.
Meg Jay
If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and coffee dates (...) a story that balances complexity and cohesion is frankly, diagnostic.
Meg Jay