Psychology Quotations

For me it's always about first impressions. I trust my instincts. I love to prepare if it's something that requires training. But I don't like to prepare the psychology too much. I enjoy the psychology of the character but I work better from a first impression.

If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us.

Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.

In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.

I'd always had an interest in physiotherapy and psychology.

I wasn't even going to do acting. I don't know how it even happened, to be honest. I was going to go into psychology or something like that. Or business. And then some moment of madness took over and I decided, 'Oh, I'm gonna go to London and try to be an actor.'

I did a little bit of acting - some guest spots here and there. I got a job working as a therapist doing individual and group crisis intervention and family therapy. I did that for two years. I left to do 'Boston Legal.' So my psychology career has been interwoven into my acting career, and it's my safety net and fallback.

By combining elements such as hypnosis, magic, neurolinguistic programming and psychology, I can make it appear that I can hack into people's brains.

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes.

In practice, socialism didnt work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.

No, I'm not a nerd. The only thing I nerd out about is psychology magazines.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

Physiology and psychology cover, between them, the field of vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of life at large, and in particular with the facts of human life.

When I get the possibility of using a character like Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson, I try and think about what's most exciting or interesting about them as a person, so I try and think what they are at their core, or what piece of their psychology do I gravitate toward that I respect, and I'm excited by it when I read books about them.

What I have always loved about modelling is the chance to play a part. I am quite shy naturally, but I like getting into somebody else's head space, understanding how people work and the psychology behind their actions.

One thing on psychology, which we've always known, is that every investor says they're long-term - and they are until the market takes a hit.

Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.

Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

Evolutionary psychology tells us that men, especially powerful men, feel invincible and entitled to spread their seed, and that women can't resist the scent of masculine power. Women, by contrast, are said to be more altruistic and collaborative, seeking power so that they can share it with others.

Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they will go out of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult.

I used to be and I still am into psychology. I would like to be able to pursue something like that, but I don't know. The older I've gotten, the more endearing this business has become and I can't really imagine leaving it

I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

Perhaps the truest axiom in baseball is that the toughest thing to do is repeat.

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis.

I am an observer, I like to watch people. I am into psychology and people - how they act and such.

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

I sometimes lie, especially about personal things, because what does it matter? I am a kind of minute commodity. My name is no longer my own. I try to lie as much as I can when I’m interviewed. It’s reverse psychology. I figure if you lie, they’ll print the truth.

Physiological psychology is, therefore, first of all psychology.

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.

I had a terrible fear of not being normal - of not seeming normal. So I went to the library and read every psychology book I could find. Anything about how normal people behave.

Any skills that I have, I couldn't really make money with them. I would like to think that maybe I would be doing something in psychology or something of that nature because I love that vein of medicine - the getting down and getting nitty-gritty.

Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.

Studying neuro-linguistic programming is what teaches you how to implant and extract thoughts. Mixing psychology, hypnotism and magic somewhat goes into this area called mentalism, which is what I mostly do. It’s magic of the mind.

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

I love to prepare if it's something that requires training. But I don't like to prepare the psychology too much.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

I started out with a business and psychology major, and then I started doing plays and concentrating more and more on theater. I dropped out of college and moved to New York and studied theater at The Neighborhood Playhouse. I did that for a couple of years and then got an agent.

Daniel Goleman has proven that two-thirds of the success in business is based upon our Emotional Intelligence as opposed to our IQ or our level of experience. As we look for the next crop of future CEOs, maybe it's time for America's corporations to start interviewing grads from the psychology master's programs rather than the M.B.A. programs.

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

If I wasn't an actor, I would probably be writing or doing something with psychology.

The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of our own consciousness.

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.

There were mornings when I just didn't want to get out of bed. But once again, I'm in an adverse situation and having to deal with something new and learn how to do it.

Jim Thompson understood something about the serial killer before the psychology caught up to it, which is that they are detached to it and they do want to get caught.

We speak of virtue, honour, reason; but our thought does not translate any one of these concepts into a substance.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt

I believe a lot about psychology, or I'd like to learn about it - I'm someone who likes to learn about everything.

What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats.

Something that always fascinated me was the psychology and the psychology differences between men and women and how we relate to one another.

Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.

When you get a group of kids together, especially boys, the psychology of those kids requires that they find a weak kid or a sensitive kid or a soft kid.

I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry.

In 2002, my husband died very suddenly. My main concern that day was how to deliver the news to our daughter, then eight. Someone put me in touch with Judith Wallerstein, an expert in child psychology who coached me through what to say.

Psychology is the science of the act of experiencing, and deals with the whole system of such acts as they make up mental life.

Physiological psychology, on the other hand, is competent to investigate the relations that hold between the processes of the physical and those of the mental life.

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness.

Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It's about education, work, marriage - it's even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

I love people, watching people interact. It's a lot of psychology. We learn about ourselves by watching other people's lives on the screen.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides.

I published in 1978 a report on dreams in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. It was the first study of its kind to demonstrate that it is possible for people to make constructive use of their dreams to improve their lives.

When I was in high school I thought I was going to university into psychology.

The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.

The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

The task of physiological psychology remains the same in the analysis of ideas that it was in the investigation of sensations: to act as mediator between the neighbouring sciences of physiology and psychology.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

The intersection of psychology and business is typically seen as being as congested, stressful, and emotionally barren as a peak commute traffic day on the L.A. freeways. But, thankfully, we live in an era in which neuroscientists are teaching us about the malleability of our brain and the emotionally contagious nature of our workplaces.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.