Quotes by Psychologists - Page 50

We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.
William James
Hope finds its fulfillment when nurtured through faith and shared with love.
Mollie Marti
It might be true that it is “quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
Daniel Kahneman
These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
John Dewey
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
Barry Schwartz
Whoever said happiness needs a plan?
Robert Holden
Happy are those who evolve from within.
Amit Abraham
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that wemake happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last blockon a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.
Bobbe Sommer
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William James
Between the MileI have always counted the miles.Sometimes they came quick,Other times slow.The distance between things,The way I could know.Close could feel far,And far could feel near.The miles that passed too quickly,The ones I ran out of fear.They weren’t all the same,So I had been told,The unmarked trails,And the days I was bold.Some miles went down,Spiraling so low,When I was afraid to look forward,There was nowhere to go.The sunset came fast,And the day turned to night,But the trails could be endless,If I looked at them right.Everything I knew,All I was told,The conversations left behind,The people who grew old.When the miles stretched out before me,I wanted to sew them at the seam,Looking forward and then back,Holding everything in between.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
The existential hero strives for authenticity even when it is costly, lives meaningfully in the midst of a banal, absurd world, and confronts rather than rejecting reality regardless of the personal cost.
Jason Dias
There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it.
Joyce Brothers
A dream is an idea involving a sense of possibilities rather than probabilities, of potential rather than limits. A dream is the wellspring of passion, giving us direction and pointing us to lofty heights. It is an expression of optimism, hope and values lofty enough to capture the imagination and engage the spirit. Dreams grab us and move us. They are capable of lifting us to new heights and overcoming self-imposed limitations.
Robert Kriegel
the holiest place on earth is where an ancient hatred has become apresent love.
Helen Shucman
When we stop fighting against death, we are able to wake up to our lives.
Daniel Gottlieb
Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.
Barry Schwartz
Freedom flourishes upon the bedrock of ethics and integrity.
Mollie Marti
Mastery is the breeding ground of fresh, creative passion.
Mollie Marti
Gently guide the tender vine else it become wild, tangled and impossible.
Kathryn Hall
Your greatest responsibility is to live a life that nourishes your highest truth.
Mollie Marti
There is no adversity that cannot bear a gift and no gift that cannot bring adversity.
Mollie Marti
The essence of successful discipline is not technique; rather, it is self-confidence.
John Rosemond
Feel not obliged to make good use of every ripe fruit on the vine.
Kathryn Hall
a problem well put is half solved.
John Dewey
we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood
William James
Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is not to be attached to the results of your actions.
Joan Borysenko
Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.
Kay Redfield Jamison
The mermaid is an archetypal image that represents a woman who is at ease in the great waters of life, the waters of emotion and sexuality. She shows us how to embrace our instinctive sexuality and sensuality so that we can affirm the essence of our feminine nature, the wisdom of our bodies, and the playfulness of our spirits. She symbolizes our connection with our deepest instinctive feelings, our wild and untamed animal nature that exists below the surface of outward personalities. She is able to respond to her mysterious sexual impulses without abandoning her more human, conscious side. What happened to the girls who dreamed of being mermaids?
Anita Johnston
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
John Dewey
We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.
Abraham H. Maslow
The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
William James
Life is suffering Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering amelioratedTruth is the handmaiden of loveDialogue is the pathway to truth Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and smallSo speech must be untrammeled So that dialogue can take placeSo that we can all humbly learn So that truth can serve loveSo that suffering can be amelioratedSo that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God
Jordan B Peterson
Fear only one person that is God, listen to only one voice that is your conscience”.
Amit Abraham
A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity.
Mollie Marti
High above the noise and fear mongering of critics and cynics softly speaks your true self.
Mollie Marti
The truth which sets men free is the truth which most men fear to accept.
Amit Abraham
It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance to a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside the system to find our lost empathy and make choices that reflect what we truly feel and believe, rather than what we've been taught to feel and believe.
Melanie Joy
An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
William James
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Eugene T. Gendlin
Our power lies in our small daily choices, one after another, to create eternal ripples of a life well lived.
Mollie Marti
Your value lies not in status or title, but in the roots of your character and depth of your compassion.
Mollie Marti
Your greatest path of influence is love.
Mollie Marti
It’s a truth I love you,It’s a hope you do,And may I live and die with it,Not knowing that you don’t.
Amit Abraham
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.
Alice MIller
To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.
Stuart Sutherland
The development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.
Erich Fromm
We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
Timothy Leary
There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
William James
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
William James
The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
Jonathan Haidt
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
B.F. Skinner
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
William James
the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease
William James
We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.
Rollo May