PSYCHOLOGY QUOTES III

quotations about psychology

Psychology quote

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

FRANZ KAFKA

notebook, October 18, 1917

Tags: Franz Kafka


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

THOMAS SZASZ

"Psychology", The Second Sin

Tags: Thomas Szasz


Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.

KARL KRAUS

Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths

Tags: Karl Kraus


The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

CELIA GREEN

The Decline and Fall of Science

Tags: Celia Green


The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. We will need much better concepts than these for a working psychic chemistry.

MARVIN MINSKY

"Music, Mind, and Meaning"


A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

SUSAN SONTAG

Illness As Metaphor

Tags: Susan Sontag


Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.

KARL KRAUS

Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths

Tags: Karl Kraus


We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

THOMAS HARDY

Far from the Madding Crowd

Tags: Thomas Hardy


One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Conquest of Happiness

Tags: Bertrand Russell


Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world.

CARL JUNG

"New Paths in Psychology"

Tags: Carl Jung


We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

Life, the Universe and Everything

Tags: Douglas Adams


Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

HERMAN EBBINGHAUS

attributed, A History of Experimental Psychology


[Modern psychology] appears as the sickly offspring of average common sense when it is taken as what it professes to be--a science of the inner life.

LUDWIG KLAGES

The Science of Character


Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is -- a vice?

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"Maxims and Arrows", Twilight of the Idols

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence


Unlike the physicist, the psychologist ... investigates processes that belong to the same order -- perception, learning, thinking -- as those by which he conducts his investigation.

MORRIS R. COHEN

Reason and Nature


Studies -- even highly revered studies -- are not necessarily flawless. It's not necessarily that the scientists have done anything wrong, it's just that it can be hard to control all the external variables. Psychology is especially vulnerable to this because it's hard to create similar conditions for similar people and every tiny detail can lead to significant differences. The scientists asking questions in a different way, having the study in one type of room and not another, everything can screw things up.

MIHAI ANDREI

"Two classic psychology studies failed the reproducibility test", ZME Science, January 11, 2017


Psychology is still groping in the dark when it concerns matters of pleasure and pain, and the most cautious assumption is therefore the most advisable.

SIGMUND FREUD

Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex

Tags: Sigmund Freud


The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.

CARL JUNG

Factors Determining Human Behavior

Tags: Carl Jung


So it seems to me that the illusion of realism arises from the fact that we don't just use folk psychology privately to anticipate--each one of us--the behavior of each other. In contrast, if chimpanzees, for instance, use folk psychology, they don't talk about it. They are individual folk psychologists, but we're not. We're communal folk psychologists who are constantly explaining to other people why we think that so and so is going to do such and such. We have to talk, and when we talk, since life is short, we have to give an edited version of what we're actually thinking, so what comes out is a few sentences. Then of course it's only too easy to suppose that those sentences are not mere edited abstractions or distillations from, but are rather something like copies of our translations of the very states in the minds of the beings we're talking about.

DANIEL CLEMENT DENNETT

Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds