American Psychologist Quotations

The length of exposure (one minute in sunlight) is still too long for the portrait. It was fifteen minutes when I first began my work. Progress may continue.

In an area where nothing was known, medicine had to draw on social lore.

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration.

Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian.

The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.

Through our willingness to help others we can learn to be happy rather than depressed.

What we actually learn, from any given set of circumstances, determines whether we become increasingly powerless or more powerful.

No matter how love-sick a woman is, she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along.

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

During exposure, interference takes place between the incident rays and those reflected by the mirror, with the formation of interference fringes half a wavelength distant from each other.

There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform.

The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness.

This result is due to a phenomenon of interference which occurs within the sensitive layer.

What you know about the people whom you know at all well is truly amazing, even though you have never formulated it.

Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense.

The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image.

In the end, the only people who fail are those who do not try.

You can be right or you can be happy.

Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up.

It will, of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common weal.

I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing.

That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.

You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.

What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.

Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, or perhaps later in life, yes when we should say no.

We are Divine enough to ask and we are important enough to receive.

Let us choose to believe something good can happen.

My first formal research, published in 1953, was on trying to understand the dynamics of prejudice, of interaction between blacks and Puerto Ricans.

My father in particular was a progressive person, a person who made his way in this society by attending the City College of New York.

We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.

To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

The photography of composite colours that exterior objects present posed a harder problem. At first sight it might have been held impossible.

We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive.

That's what's so great about my job. I get paid to do what got me in trouble in grade school space out and play with my imaginary friends. In terms of Isaac, when the time's right.

You possess a potent force that you either use, or misuse, hundreds of times every day.

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

These people are real to me, and situations keep coming up where their emergence feels natural. It's like meeting old friends. I hope readers feel the same way.

I hope we don't ever just kind of become Stepford Americans where everybody is just kind of going along and nodding their heads.

In my early professionals years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

If you do jot feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know.

Being fast and not very spatial doesn't make you any better in spatial kinds of things; you probably just get the wrong answer more quickly.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella).

The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.

And so I had an early but somewhat vague interest in both medicine and in what was to become, in my mind and in my work, psychiatry.

We're a nonprofit organization, and it usually costs $100 an hour for individual therapy. Participating in a group costs $120 a month.

The psychotics, naturally, don't think straight. Severe personality disorders take much longer to treat than people who are neurotic.

We teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

The fact that you are willing to say, ''I do not understand, and it is fine,'' is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

I'm very happy. I like my work and the various aspects of it-going around the world, teaching the gospel according to St. Albert.

I just had a client this week who came to me after 10 years of Freudian therapy. He's in love with his analyst, and she is sort of in love with him.