Psychology

"It’s an odd quirk of the scientific personality that pessimism can result just as readily from a lack of outstanding problems as from their continued presence."

"Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the world at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world."

"No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius."

"Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone."

"The subject is given one plate [inkblot] after the other and asked, "What might this be?""

"I asked her what [Unconscious "Rorschach in Danmaku"] actually supposed to be, but she said it's just a random blob that happens to look like some kinda meaningful shape. It just looks like a colony a' mosquitoes to me."

"This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"

"Almost all subjects regard the experiment as a test of imagination. This conception is so general that it becomes, practically, a condition of the experiment. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the figures actually has little to do with imagination, and it is unnecessary to consider imagination a prerequisite....The interpretation of the chance forms falls in the field of perception and apperception rather than imagination."

"The study of the structure of subjective experience."

"You want to become competent at whatever you do. That does not mean to get phobics, who shake in their boots while their blood pressure blows through the roof, to believe, "This is not fear." The object is to get them to stay calm and alert, and to stay in their own lane, and to drive across the bridge, which remains standing."

"We have presented these patterns as explicitly and systematically as we can, in order to make it easy for you to learn them. We have presented them in great detail, and warned you about all the mistakes we and others have made with them, to make it hard for you to use them inappropriately. Once you have taken the time to learn these methods thoroughly, you can become more flexible and artistic in utilizing them with clients, with confidence that your behavior will remain systematic and effective."

"[Milton Erickson] does not translate unconscious communication into conscious form. Whatever the patient says in metaphoric form, Erickson responds [matches] in kind. By parables, by interpersonal action, and by directives, he works within the metaphor to bring about change. He seems to feel that the depth and swiftness of that change can be prevented if the person suffers a translation of the communication."

"An attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques."

"Ask yourself; "Can we build better?" To build those things we have to be able to suspend whatever belief system we already have. Keep it out of the way... Those things get very, very personal. We're talking about basic beliefs regarding human capability. Here's the only truth about that. Nobody knows."

"The middle gear of any man is self-discipline."

"Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure."

"I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill."

"Self: that invisible chain that snaps tight whenever we stray."

"Self-image is the beginning and ending of living, I think."

"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

"Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul."

"What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us."

"Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other people than in their own."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."

"I hope not to encounter such a person again on my path who is interested in everything about me except my true self."

"Whether you become a daughter, sister, lover, partner, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother, or anything else with complete honesty, the satisfaction you'll find in becoming yourself cannot be found in becoming any of these relative beings"

"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

"The key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously."

"I am tipsy after my own feelings themselves have become wine. I forget myself, world and all."

"May I not so much be lost as would have No time to look at myself Ever."

"I want to love the self that you say is you."

"Nosce te ipsum."

"Of course, "O'Blivion" was not the name I was born with. That's my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names — names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate."

"We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves — so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? ...We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto, 'everyone is furthest from himself' applies to us for ever, - we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves…"

"Self is the medium thro' which Judgment's ray Can seldom pass without being turned astray."

"It strikes me that self, not just my self, but all self, the phenomenon of self, is perhaps one field, one consciousness – perhaps there is only one ‘I’, perhaps our brains, our selves, our entire identity is little more than a label on a waveband. We are only us when we are here. At this particular moment in space and time, this particular locus, the overall awareness of the entire continuum happens to believe it is Alan Moore. Over there – [he points to another table in the pizza restaurant] – it happens to believe it is something else. I get the sense that if you can pull back from this particular locus, this web-site if you like, then you could be the whole net. All of us could be. That there is only one awareness here, that is trying out different patterns. We are going to have to come to some resolution about a lot of things in the next twenty years time, our notions of time, space, identity."

"Should one think of a city as having a Self?"

"One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities—and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self—a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help."

"Self-awareness is a complex, but carefully constructed illusion: we rightly place high value on the work of those mental agencies that appear able to reflect on the behavior of other agencies—especially our linguistic and ego-structure mechanisms."

"Music is reflection of self, we just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail."

"The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count."

"No Self, No Fear."

"At the highest level of satori from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the Universal Mind or God. In more modern terms you have done a mathematical transformation in which your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness... It was in this state that I experienced "myself" as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A "membrane"."

"Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing oneself is enlightenment."

"Rose: Does something like a "self" exist inside of you?"

"“A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”"

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

"Your identity changes with how you perceive reality."

"In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down."