Best 100+ Psychology Quotes to Promote Introspection and Self-Discovery
Psychology is in essence the scientific study of mental life and although it is a relatively new science, its origins can be traced back to ancient Greece and the philosophical quests of great thinkers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who tried to decipher the secrets of the mind and explain human behavior. Understanding our mental processes and how our mind is the driving force behind everything we do is crucial, so we here we have curated for you a collection of deep psychology quotes to promote introspection and self-discovery.
The enigma of human behavior and how our mind determines our feelings and actions has puzzled some of the world’s greatest minds since antiquity. However, it is only during the last century and a half that great advancements have been made in the field of psychology. Brilliant psychologists, psychoanalysts and thinkers like Jean Piaget, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and many other great minds, brought a new perspective to the field and shed new light that has advanced our knowledge and understanding.
You may not realize it, but psychology is present in every moment of your life, in every thought, every feeling and every action, even in the most mundane daily activities. It is hidden behind the why you do the things you do, how your psychological makeup influences your choices and how you eventually develop your personality and become who you are.
In a nutshell, psychology helps you not only explore and discover yourself, but also to live a better and happier life, because knowing who you are allows you more control of your decisions about life. By harmonizing your decisions in accordance to your goals you can influence your destiny, instead of reacting passively to circumstances and challenges. You become fully engaged with life and grow into the person you have always envisioned!
Table of Contents
- Quotes About Psychology for Everyday Use
- Short Psychology Quotes To Help You Start The Journey
- Psychology Quotes About Projections and Repressions and Ways To Grow
- Deep Quotes About Psychology to Help Us Gain Insight into Who We Are
- Funny Psychology Quotes That Add to Our Understanding of Ourselves
- Psychology Quotes About Its Scope
Quotes About Psychology for Everyday Use
A collection of inspirational psychology quotes for everyday use that offer a fresh perspective on issues that everyone faces in their daily lives.
- If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave. Mo Willems
- In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart. Sigmund Freud
- It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. Lucille Ball
- It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. Abraham Maslow
- The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well. Alfred Adler
- Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification. Sigmund Freud
- Without love we fall ill. Sigmund Freud
- Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration. Jean Piaget
- As you love yourself, so shall you love others. Strange but true, with no exceptions. Harry Stack Sullivan
- The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important. Abraham Maslow
- The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions. Alfred Adler
- Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice. William James
- The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others. Erik Erikson
- Follow your heart but take your brain with you. Alfred Adler
- Only a person who has faith in himself can be faithful to other. Erich Fromm
- All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it. Sigmund Freud
- Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. Alfred Adler
- Every pampered child becomes a hated child…. There is no greater evil than the pampering of children. Alfred Adler
- Awareness in itself is healing. Frederick Salomon Perls
- Knowledge is an antidote to fear. Gerd Gigerenzer
- Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Sigmund Freud
- Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind. Irvin D. Yalom
Short Psychology Quotes To Help You Start The Journey
Your mind creates your reality and influences the way you interact with it. These short psychology quotes will help you start the journey into discovering truths about perspective and human behavior.
- Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself. Alfred Adler
- The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation. Alice Miller
- One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. Abraham Maslow
- The brain is wider than the sky. Emily Dickinson
- The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity. Rollo May
- Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Carl G. Jung
- Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination. Sigmund Freud
- What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. Jean Piaget
- We know what we are but not what we may be. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us. David Richo
- The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Carl G. Jung
- If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life. Abraham Maslow
- All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil. Abraham Maslow
- How hurtful it can be to deny one’s true self and live a life of lies just to appease others. June Ahern
- If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain. Irvin D. Yalom
- One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. Sigmund Freud
- We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves. Abraham Maslow
- One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life. Abraham Maslow
- Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. Viktor E. Frankl
- Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge. Frederick Salomon Perls
- One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt. Alan Wilson Watts
- If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it. Nicholas Sparks
- Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you. Donald Woods Winnicott
- Depression is the inability to construct a future. Rollo May
- In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. Erik Erikson
- Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength. Sigmund Freud
- Only the wounded healer can truly heal. Irvin D. Yalom
- Reality denied comes back to haunt. Philip K. Dick
- The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face. Donald Woods Winnicott
- When we can no longer change the situation, we can only change ourselves. Viktor Frankl
- You can be healed of depression if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you will bring a real joy to someone else. Alfred Adler
- It is very obvious that we are not influenced by “facts” but by our interpretation of the facts. Alfred Adler
- From error to error one discovers the entire truth. Sigmund Freud
- A mind cannot be independent of culture. Lev Vygotsky
Psychology Quotes About Projections and Repressions and Ways To Grow
Psychology quotes about projections and repressions as defense mechanisms in dealing with unwanted feelings and thoughts, and how their exclusion unburdens the ego and influences the ways to grow.
- Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event. Carl G. Jung
- Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. Carl Jung
- A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous. Alfred Adler
- Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
- For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath. Alice Miller
- If we do not work on all three levels — body, feeling, mind — the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood. Alice Miller
- The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. Albert Ellis
- The greater the crowd, the more insignificant the person. Carl G. Jung
- A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Douglas Adams
- I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time. Anna Freud
- Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it. Andy Rooney
- I am not in this life to fulfill the expectations of other people, nor do I feel that the world should comply with mine. Fritz Perls
- It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour. Gabor Mate
- Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. Richard Adams
Deep Quotes About Psychology to Help Us Gain Insight into Who We Are
Hand-picked, deep psychology quotes to help you gain insight in who you are through the wisdom of some of the world’s most prominent psychologists and great thinkers.
- Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Carl G. Jung
- Love means giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. Jacques Lacan
- How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole. Carl G. Jung
- A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions. Alice Miller
- Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation. Donald Woods Winnicott
- Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. Sigmund Freud
- Through others we become ourselves. Lev. S. Vygotsky
- The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way. Silvano Arieti
- Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. William James
- Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Arthur Schopenhauer
- If an individual is intellectually passive, he will not be free morally. Jean Piaget
- Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age. Rollo May
- Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
- Creativity does not depend on inherited talent or on environment or upbringing; it is the function of the ego of every human being. Silvano Arieti
- Man is many things, but he is not rational. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings. Alice Miller
- Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair. Irvin D. Yalom
- It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. Donald Woods Winnicott
- We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others. Brené Brown
- The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body. Carl G. Jung
Funny Psychology Quotes That Add to Our Understanding of Ourselves
Funny psychology quotes can add to our understanding of ourselves by providing insights through a more humorous and amusing perspective.
- Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. Carl G. Jung
- I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. Abraham Maslow
- The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. Paul Valery
- Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. Mark Twain
- It’s a poor thing to be sane! Donald Woods Winnicott
- Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Clive James
- A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. Jerome Lawrence
- Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches. Sigmund Freud
- Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. Voltaire
Psychology Quotes About Its Scope
Insightful psychology quotes about its scope as a science and how it can helps us develop an understanding of human nature and the ways it responds to the reality created by our mental processes.
- The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. William James
- The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help. Irvin D. Yalom
- Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change. Albert Bandura
- I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. Abraham Maslow
- What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself. Abraham Maslow
- The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. Rollo May
- The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. Alice Miller
- We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones. Anaïs Nin
- I have discovered the value of psychology and psychiatry, that their teachings can undo knots in us and permit life to flow again and aid us in becoming more truly human. Jean Vanier
- Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think. Martin Seligman
We are what we repeatedly do and, in this sense, first we make our habits and then our habits make us. Psychology can help you learn about the why’s and how’s of your mental and behavioral makeup. The more conscious of who you are, the easier it becomes to find your way through life since, despite the challenges, you are confident that in alignment with your goals, your actions will determine your destiny. Make psychology a daily habit and find balance and contentment in your life!
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