PSYCHOLOGY QUOTES

quotations about psychology

Psychology quote

The practical basis of the medical profession rested on psychology. Everyone felt better when self-confident, expensive experts could be called in to handle a vital emergency. Doctors relieved others of the responsibility for deciding what to do. As such, their role was strictly comparable to that of the priesthood, whose ministrations to the soul relieved anxieties parallel to those relieved by medical ministrations to the body.

WILLIAM HARDY MCNEILL

Plagues and Peoples


It is a principle of modern psychology that the feelings most apt to influence behavior are those that we try hardest to suppress.

THEODORE ROSZAK

The Gendered Atom


The world of psychology contains looks and tones and feelings; it is the world of dark and light, of noise and silence, of rough and smooth; its space is sometimes large and sometimes small, as everyone knows who in adult life has gone back to his childhood's home; its time is sometimes short and sometimes long, it has no invariables. It contains all the thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, volitions that you naturally ascribe to mind.

E. B. TITCHENER

A Beginner's Psychology

Tags: Edward B. Titchener


I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.

ALAN MOORE

Watchmen


It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences.

GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD

Philosophy of Mind: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology

Tags: George Trumbull Ladd


We are virtuoso exploiters of not so much a theory as a craft. That is, we might better call it a folk craft rather than a folk theory. The theory of folk psychology is the ideology about the craft, and there is lots of room, as anthropologists will remind us, for false ideology.

DANIEL CLEMENT DENNETT

Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds


Psychology should be the chief basic science upon which the practices of education depend. It should have supplied education with the information it needs concerning the processes of understanding, learning, and thinking, among other things. One of the difficulties has been that such theory as has been developed has been based primarily upon studies of behavior of rats and pigeons. As someone has said, some of the theory thus developed has been an insult even to the rat.

J. P. GUILFORD

The Nature of Human Intelligence

Tags: J.P. Guilford


The biggest misconception about psychology is that it is not rigorous enough to tackle the big, "important" questions because its methods as a field are limited. While psychology continues to be an important source of insights about human nature and potential, as a young and growing science it faces pressure from all sides to prove its worth.

ANGELA MEDVEDEVA

"Interview with Angela Medvedeva", Times Higher Education, January 19, 2017


Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?

RUDOLPH ARNHEIM

Parables of Sun Light

Tags: Rudolf Arnheim


According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

J. K. ROWLING

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Tags: J. K. Rowling


Human psychology is hideously complex, and the various ways that people depart from rationality don't tend to fit together into a simple, measurable theory.

NOAH SMITH

"Behavioral Economics Isn't Dead Yet", Bloomberg, January 25, 2017


Cancer has the biopsy, kidney disease has the urine test, and HIV has the cheek swab, yet diagnosis for mental illness is often nothing more than a survey or a conversation with a psychiatrist.

TARAH KNARESBORO

"Read My Blood", Psychology Today, May 3, 2011


The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored.

OSCAR WILDE

The Ideal Husband

Tags: Oscar Wilde


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

CARL JUNG

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Tags: Carl Jung


All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.

JOHN RALSTON SAUL

Reflection of a Siamese Twin

Tags: John Ralston Saul


Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

JOHN DEWEY

The Public and Its Problems

Tags: John Dewey


I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

MARTHA GELLHORN

Selected Letters


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

St. Mawr

Tags: D. H. Lawrence


Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Thomas

Tags: Dean Koontz


It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

ABRAHAM MASLOW

Motivation and Personality