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Inspiring Psychological Quotes

Explore profound quotes that ignite reflection and inspire thought from the greatest minds in psychology.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."

Carl G. Jung

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spring notebook

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Inspiring Psychological Quotes

  • Sigmund Freud: "Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."

  • Abraham Maslow: "What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization."

  • Carl Rogers: "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."

  • Viktor Frankl: "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

  • Albert Ellis: "The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own."

  • Karen Horney: "The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization."

  • B.F. Skinner: "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

  • Rollo May: "The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity."

  • William James: "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

  • Erich Fromm: "Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is."

  • Jean Piaget: "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

  • Melanie Klein: "One of the deepest impulses in man is the desire for self-knowledge."

  • Carl Jung: "Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people."

  • Martin Seligman: "Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others."

  • Daniel Kahneman: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."

  • John Bowlby: "What cannot be communicated to the mother cannot be communicated to the self."

  • Philip Zimbardo: "Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all aspects of our behavior."

  • Aaron Beck: "The way you talk to yourself influences the way you feel."

  • Elizabeth Loftus: "The human mind is a wonderful thing, but it is also fallible."

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

  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: "The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."

  • David D. Burns: "The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs."

  • Marsha Linehan: "You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."

  • Daniel Goleman: "What really matters for success, character, happiness, and life-long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills."

  • Albert Bandura: "Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure."

  • Mary Ainsworth: "It is through relationships that we develop our strongest self-knowledge."

  • Rene Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."

  • Francis Galton: "The power of individuals is best judged by the extent to which they have made good use of their time."

  • John Dewey: "We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience."

  • Erik Erikson: "Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all."

  • Carl Jung: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart."

  • Sigmund Freud: "We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."

  • Anna Freud: "Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."

  • Karen Horney: "Life itself still remains a very effective therapist."

  • Alfred Adler: "It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."

  • Virginia Satir: "We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us."

  • Albert Bandura: "Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience."

  • Carl Rogers: "The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."

  • Abraham Maslow: "One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth."

  • Jean Piaget: "Play is the work of childhood."

  • Lev Vygotsky: "Through others, we become ourselves."

  • Stanley Milgram: "The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."

  • Philip Zimbardo: "Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others."

  • Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."

  • Aaron T. Beck: "Depression is a state of mind in which you believe you are in control of nothing."

  • Wilhelm Wundt: "The task of psychology is to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations."

  • Rollo May: "Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."

  • Melanie Klein: "Guilt is an essential ingredient in the development of a strong moral sense."

  • Henry Murray: "Personality is rooted in biology and bound by time."

  • Albert Ellis: "People have disturbed themselves by thinking in irrational ways."

  • Marsha Linehan: "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."

  • John Watson: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select."

  • Jerome Bruner: "We are storytelling organisms that, individually and collectively, lead storied lives."

  • William Glasser: "What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today."

  • Erik Erikson: "Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."

  • Victor Frankl: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances."

  • Anna Freud: "We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees."

  • Melanie Klein: "The core of all personal relationships is the emotional experience of the individual."

  • Carl Rogers: "When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity—then understanding is called for."

  • Virginia Satir: "Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible."