Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats. – Douglas Busch
Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression. – Mark Epstein
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution. – G.K. Chesterton
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. – Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin: Psychology, 1973
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. – Vladimir Nabokov, 1951
People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding. – Wilhelm Stekel
A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. – Paul Dudley White
The reflex is physiology below the collar button. Psychology is physiology above the collar button. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. – Carl Jung
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. – Alan Watts
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. – Sigmund Freud, attributed
There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere. – C.G. Jung
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. – Carl G. Jung
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. – Aeschylus
I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unseasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night. – James Thurber
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. – Mason Cooley
If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well. – Rainer Maria Rilke, on leaving psychotherapy
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology. – D.H. Lawrence, St.Mawr
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. – Sigmund Freud
Sure you can psychoanalyze! But as Baehr used to say, why bother to sort garbage? – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
