If you’ve arrived here, it indicates your passion for delving into the intricacies of human psychology and understanding the workings of the human mind. Join us on a deep exploration through the pathways of the human psyche as we present a thoughtfully curated compilation of 100 psychology quotes. This exceptional collection features some of the finest psychology quotes ever, predominantly sourced from established psychologists themselves. Rest assured, we won’t fabricate them; each quote will be duly credited to its author, along with the potential reference to the originating book. Let the journey into the fascinating realm of human psychology commence!
From the timeless wisdom of psychologists to the insightful musings of influential figures across various disciplines, this compilation brings to you the best, most inspirational, and thought-provoking quotes related to mental health. Delve into the depths of understanding as we present you with famous psychology quotes, each carefully selected to offer motivation, inspiration, and a comprehensive perspective on the intricate workings of the mind. Uncover the secrets of the psyche with these important and interesting psychology quotes, meticulously gathered to illuminate the path of self-discovery and well-being.
Join us as we explore the top quotes about psychology, creating a tapestry of wisdom that resonates across disciplines and echoes through the corridors of the human experience. Read the Top 100 Best Psychology Quotes of All Time. These are the most famous quotes ever. These interesting psychology quotes will inspire you.
1. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.
Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
2. We have, as human beings, a storytelling probem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
3. The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
4. No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. It’s the belief that everything is f*cked, so why do anything at all?
Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope
5. People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
6. No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
7. Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
8. The misconception:
You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.
THE TRUTH:
You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart
9. We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
10. A loser doesn’t know what he’ll do if he loses but talks about what he’ll do if he wins. A winner doesn’t talk about what he’ll do if he wins but knows what he’ll do if.
Eric Berne
11. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree
12. We measure our lives using different markers: years, major events, achievements. We can also measure them by the choices we make, the sum total of which has brought us to wherever and whoever we are today.
Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing
13. The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
14. For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.
Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
15. Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
16. Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn x t gts lttl hrdr f y dn’t vn kn whr th vwls r.
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct
17. Infantile Love follows the principle:
I love because I am loved.
Mature Love follows the principle:
I am loved because I love.
Immature Love says:
I love you because I need you.
Mature Love says:
I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
18. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.
Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
19. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
Amos Tversky Cognitive Psychologist
20. We shared a common interest in how the past effects people—some let it decide who they are, while others make it part of what they will do.
Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships
21. The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
22. You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything!
Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree
23. We live in a world where boredom is a dirty word, and people often compete to see who’s busier, as if their sense of self-worth could be measured by how little time they have.
William Stixrud, The Self-Driven Child
24. Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
25. If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.
David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
26. Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.
Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit
27. Knowledge does not change behavior, he Jerry Sternin said. We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.
Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
28. When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better?
Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
29. A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others, but from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.
Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage To Be Disliked
30. In general, we are often overly focused on endings when we evaluate overall experiences. From this perspective, a cake at the end of a meal is of particular importance.
Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality
31. If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.
Philip G. Zimbardo
32. The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
33. We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.
Virginia Satir
34. Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are loss averse.
Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
35. DON’T JUST:
Don’t just learn, experience.
Don’t just read, absorb.
Don’t just change, transform.
Don’t just relate, advocate.
Don’t just promise, prove.
Don’t just criticize, encourage.
Don’t just think, ponder.
Don’t just take, give.
Don’t just see, feel.
Don’t just dream, do.
Don’t just hear, listen.
Don’t just talk, act.
Don’t just tell, show.
Don’t just exist, live.
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
36. EXPERIENCE is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets
37. Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten
B. F. Skinner
38. It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
Junot Diaz
39. Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans
John Lennon
40. We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:
The close
The many
The powerful
James Clear, Atomic Habits
41. Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person that you wish to become.
James Clear
42. The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.
Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree
43. What you aim at determines what you see.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
44. It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain
45. Life is suffering,
Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated,
Truth is the handmaiden of love,
Dialogue is a pathway to truth,
Humility is the recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn through dialogue,
To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and in small,
Speech must remain untrammeled so that dialog can take place,
So that we can all humbly learn,
So that truth can serve love,
So that suffering can be ameliorated,
So that all of us can stumble forward to the Kingdom of God.
Wisdom, Dr. Jordan Peterson
46. Your life isn’t margaritas on a beach in Jamaica. That happens now and then. Those are exceptions. Your life is how your wife greets you at the door when you come home every day, cause that’s like 10 minutes a day. Your life is how you treat each other over the breakfast table, ‘cause that’ an hour and a half or an hour every single day. You get those mundane things right, those things you do every day. You concentrate on them and make them pristine. It’s like you got 80% of your life together. These little things that are right in front of us, they aren’t so little…
Jordan Peterson
47. Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise.
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887 – 1904, Translated and Edited By: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, page 272
48. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
49. No whim of fate, no Freudian trauma, no loss of a loved one will be as devastating to the human spirit as some prolonged ambivalent relationship that leaves us forever unable to say goodbye.
George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life
50. The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.
Alfred North Whitehead
51. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
52. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
Mark Twain
53. The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Albert Ellis
54. Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
Criss Jami, Healology
55. Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Sigmund Freud
56. The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three…The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
Sigmund Freud
57. If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Carl Jung
58. Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Jung
59. Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.
Jean Piaget
60. What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Jean Piaget
61. The key characteristic of a relationship that buffers stress is that it is lasting: the person is known to be safe, familiar, and at least reasonably predictable. This cannot be built in a day: viewing people as interchangeable simply creates a repetitive cycle of grief and loss. To break it, we have to stick around.
Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog
62. The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
63. …we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
64. Every transformation demands as its precondition the ending of a world-the collapse of an old philosophy of life.
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
65. The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
66. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly…
Jean Piaget, Play And Development
67. The satisfactions people derive from what they do are determined to a large degree by their self-evaluative standards.
Albert Bandura
68. For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan 1997. Contact, p.430, Simon and Schuster
69. Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology, in two volumes. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
70. An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.
Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche ed. 1960
71. Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
72. No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
73. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You 1937, p. 14
74. Quite often, when we think we are listening, all we are doing is waiting for a gap for an opportunity to speak back; we use our energy to compose our responses or our reply rather than to try to understand what the other person is trying to communicate.
Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and Your Children Will be Glad That You Did
75. My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
76. It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease, than what sort of disease a patient has.
William Oster
77. If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
Jean-Paul Sartre
78. I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.
Carl Jung, Liber Novus ed. 2009
79. The great enemy of communication . . . is the illusion of it.
Whyte, W. H. 1950. Is Anybody Listening. Fortune Magazine
80. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin
81. You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do!
Olin Miller, 1936, Reno Evening Gazette
82. Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you? Oh, he said, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered ! Whereupon I replied, You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering —to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her. He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
83. Three bricklayers are asked: What are you doing? The first says, I am laying bricks. The second says, I am building a church. And the third says, I am building the house of God. The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.
Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
84. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
85. The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
86. As in the inflammations and fevers of physical illness, what looks like trouble may be the very process by which healing takes place. As we become better able to endure life’s slings and arrows, our coping mechanisms mature, and vice versa.
George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study
87. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
88. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
H. Jackson Brown Jr., P. S. I Love You
89. You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
Jim Carrey
90. People do not see that the main question is not: Am I loved? which is to a large extent the question: Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired? The main question is: Can I love?
Enrich Fromm, Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy: About Gender
91. The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.
Thomas M. Sterner
92. I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell!
Rollo May
93. I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.
Robin Williams, World’s Greatest Dad
94. If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
95. A man’s satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife’s sister’s husband.
H. L. Mencken
96. If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
Jean Piaget
97. It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Sigmund Freud
98. I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
Daniel Keyes
99. Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
Lou Holtz
100.
Things that aren’t doing the thing:
Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Making a to-do list for the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Telling people you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Writing a banger tweet about how you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on other people who have done the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you’ll receive once you do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this essay isn’t doing the thing.
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.
Strangest Loop https://strangestloop.io/
As we conclude this enlightening journey through the realms of psychology quotes, we invite you to carry the torch of inspiration forward. These quotes, crafted by psychologists and luminaries from various fields, stand as beacons of insight into the vast landscape of mental health. May these motivational psychology quotes continue to guide you, offering solace, encouragement, and a profound understanding of the human psyche. Remember, the fabric of our well-being is woven with the threads of wisdom found in these powerful words. Seize the inspiration from these top psychology quotes and let them be companions on your ongoing exploration of the mind. The essence of these quotes lingers, promising a continued resonance as you navigate the intricacies of mental health and personal growth.
