PSYCHOLOGY QUOTES III
quotations about psychology
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
THOMAS SZASZ
"Psychology", The Second Sin
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
Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.
KARL KRAUS
Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths
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
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
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"
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
Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.
KARL KRAUS
Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths
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
Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.
HERMAN EBBINGHAUS
attributed, A History of Experimental Psychology
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Life, the Universe and Everything
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
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
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
THOMAS HARDY
Far from the Madding Crowd
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
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"
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
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
[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
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