Psychiatrist Archives - Pictorial Quotes

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’

Viktor E. Frankl

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.

Viktor E. Frankl

The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.

Viktor E. Frankl

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient’s being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.

Viktor E. Frankl

If you call ‘religious’ a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really.

Viktor E. Frankl

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

Viktor E. Frankl

A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.

Viktor E. Frankl

Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.

Viktor E. Frankl

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Viktor E. Frankl

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Viktor E. Frankl

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.

Viktor E. Frankl

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Viktor E. Frankl

In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

Viktor E. Frankl

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Viktor E. Frankl

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’

Viktor E. Frankl

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.

Viktor E. Frankl

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

Viktor E. Frankl

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.

Viktor E. Frankl

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Viktor E. Frankl

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.

Viktor E. Frankl

Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.

Viktor E. Frankl

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

Viktor E. Frankl

Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.

Viktor E. Frankl

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Viktor E. Frankl

Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor E. Frankl

A human being is a deciding being.

Viktor E. Frankl

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor E. Frankl

When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor E. Frankl

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

Viktor E. Frankl

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

Viktor E. Frankl

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Viktor E. Frankl

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

Viktor E. Frankl

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Viktor E. Frankl

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

Sigmund Freud

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

Sigmund Freud

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Sigmund Freud

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Sigmund Freud

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Sigmund Freud

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

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.

Sigmund Freud

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

Sigmund Freud

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Sigmund Freud

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Sigmund Freud

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

Sigmund Freud

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

Sigmund Freud

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

Sigmund Freud

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.

Sigmund Freud

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Sigmund Freud

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Sigmund Freud

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

Sigmund Freud

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

Sigmund Freud

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

Sigmund Freud

Anatomy is destiny.

Sigmund Freud

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Sigmund Freud

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

Sigmund Freud

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Sigmund Freud

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

Sigmund Freud

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Sigmund Freud

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Sigmund Freud

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sigmund Freud

Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.

Sigmund Freud

If you can’t do it, give up!

Sigmund Freud

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

Sigmund Freud

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud

I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Sigmund Freud

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Sigmund Freud

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Sigmund Freud

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Sigmund Freud

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

Sigmund Freud

The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable: yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.

Sigmund Freud

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Sigmund Freud

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Sigmund Freud

The goal of all life is death.

Sigmund Freud

If youth knew; if age could.

Sigmund Freud

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.

Sigmund Freud

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

Sigmund Freud

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Sigmund Freud

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.

Sigmund Freud

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

Sigmund Freud

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Sigmund Freud

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Sigmund Freud

The ego is not master in its own house.

Sigmund Freud

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

Sigmund Freud

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

Sigmund Freud

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Sigmund Freud

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Sigmund Freud

One is very crazy when in love.

Sigmund Freud

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

Sigmund Freud

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Sigmund Freud

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Sigmund Freud

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Sigmund Freud

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Sigmund Freud

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’

Sigmund Freud

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Sigmund Freud

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.

Sigmund Freud

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Sigmund Freud

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

Sigmund Freud

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Sigmund Freud

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Sigmund Freud

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Sigmund Freud

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,’ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

Jordan Peterson

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Jordan Peterson

Abortion is clearly wrong.

Jordan Peterson

We’re so immaturely cynical as a culture. We’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.

Jordan Peterson

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

Jordan Peterson

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, ‘No.’

Jordan Peterson

I don’t tell people, ‘You’re okay the way that you are.’ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‘You’re way less than you could be.’

Jordan Peterson

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

Jordan Peterson

I have something in common with Nazis in that I am opposed to the radical Left. And when you oppose the radical Left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.

Jordan Peterson

If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

Jordan Peterson

If you’re not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you’re going to be punished for them, then what’s your motivation to continue?

Jordan Peterson

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

Jordan Peterson

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

Jordan Peterson

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

Jordan Peterson

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

Jordan Peterson

I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

Jordan Peterson

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

Jordan Peterson

To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

Jordan Peterson

I could hardly sit through ‘Frozen.’ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Jordan Peterson

The most propagandistic element of ‘Frozen’ was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story, who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending.

Jordan Peterson

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‘Harry Potter”s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

Jordan Peterson

You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it’s not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there’s been human beings.

Jordan Peterson

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

Jordan Peterson

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

Jordan Peterson

The right-wingers don’t want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

Jordan Peterson

If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

Jordan Peterson

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Jordan Peterson

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Jordan Peterson

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

Jordan Peterson

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

Jordan Peterson

Part of the core information that I’ve been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous.

Jordan Peterson

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Jordan Peterson

You can’t just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can’t incite people to crime. There’s all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.

Jordan Peterson

One of the things I’ve told men over and over and over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women!

Jordan Peterson

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

Jordan Peterson

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

Jordan Peterson

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

Jordan Peterson

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Jordan Peterson

I’m a practical person. I’m not too bad a carpenter. I can renovate houses.

Jordan Peterson

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

Jordan Peterson

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

Jordan Peterson

It’s a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they’re almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

Jordan Peterson

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

Jordan Peterson

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

Jordan Peterson

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

Jordan Peterson

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

Jordan Peterson

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Jordan Peterson

You can’t have a value structure without a hierarchy. They’re the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.

Jordan Peterson

It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.

Jordan Peterson

It’s very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.

Jordan Peterson

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

Jordan Peterson

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

Jordan Peterson

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

Jordan Peterson

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

Jordan Peterson

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

Jordan Peterson

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Jordan Peterson

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

Jordan Peterson

I’m interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

Jordan Peterson

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

Jordan Peterson

There were some great clinicians in the 20th century – great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius – there’s a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

Jordan Peterson

Obviously, I’m no fan of the radical left.

Jordan Peterson

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

Jordan Peterson

Everything isn’t political.

Jordan Peterson

People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.

Jordan Peterson

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Jordan Peterson

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

Jordan Peterson

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

Jordan Peterson

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

Jordan Peterson

My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

Jordan Peterson

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

Jordan Peterson

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

Jordan Peterson

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?

Jordan Peterson

You may say, ‘Well, dragons don’t exist.’ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‘predator’ and the category ‘dragon’ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

Jordan Peterson

‘Happiness’ is a pointless goal.

Jordan Peterson

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

Jordan Peterson

Power is competence.

Jordan Peterson

There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.

Jordan Peterson

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

Jordan Peterson

You can say, ‘Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.

Jordan Peterson

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

Jordan Peterson

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Jordan Peterson

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Jordan Peterson

When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

Jordan Peterson

Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that’s being pushed in a manner in schools that’s completely reprehensible. It’s not education, in my estimation. It’s a form of indoctrination.

Jordan Peterson

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

Jordan Peterson

All things considered, there’s nobody better for children than parents.

Jordan Peterson

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

Jordan Peterson

I’m always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousnessness and strange nature.

Jordan Peterson

You can’t go backward in life.

Jordan Peterson

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Jordan Peterson

If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I’ll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.

Jordan Peterson

Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.

Jordan Peterson

Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.

Jordan Peterson

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

Jordan Peterson

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

Jordan Peterson

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

Jordan Peterson

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

Jordan Peterson

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.

Jordan Peterson

If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

Jordan Peterson

Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

Jordan Peterson

Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.

Jean Piaget

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

Jean Piaget

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

Jean Piaget

One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.

Jean Piaget

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

Jean Piaget

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.

Jean Piaget

Children’s games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules – that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.

Jean Piaget

All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.

Jean Piaget

Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.

Jean Piaget

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

Jean Piaget

With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject’s conscience, do not really transform his conduct.

Jean Piaget

During the first few months of an infant’s life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle.

Jean Piaget

To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.

Jean Piaget

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone’s actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral – in a word, that there is a Universal Order.

Jean Piaget

Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.

Jean Piaget

From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.

Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to the question, ‘How does anything new come about?’

Jean Piaget

Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.

Jean Piaget

Play is the work of childhood.

Jean Piaget

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Jean Piaget

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Jean Piaget

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

Jean Piaget

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Jean Piaget

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

Jean Piaget

On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.

Jean Piaget

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

Jean Piaget

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

Jean Piaget

From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.

Jean Piaget

The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.

Jean Piaget

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

Jean Piaget

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.

Jean Piaget

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Jean Piaget

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

Jean Piaget

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.

Jean Piaget

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.

Jean Piaget

To reason logically is so to link one’s propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one’s own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.

Jean Piaget

The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.

Jean Piaget

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

Jean Piaget

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.

Jean Piaget

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

Jean Piaget

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

Jean Piaget

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

Jean Piaget

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Jean Piaget

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Jean Piaget

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Carl Jung

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

Carl Jung

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Carl Jung

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Carl Jung

Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.

Carl Jung

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

Carl Jung

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‘continent,’ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

Carl Jung

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

Carl Jung

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

Carl Jung

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

Carl Jung

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

Carl Jung

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Carl Jung

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Carl Jung

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Carl Jung

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

Carl Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Carl Jung

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

Carl Jung

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Carl Jung

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Carl Jung

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Carl Jung

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

Carl Jung

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

Carl Jung

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Carl Jung

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Carl Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

Carl Jung

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Carl Jung

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Carl Jung

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Carl Jung

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

Carl Jung

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

Carl 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

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

Carl Jung

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

Carl Jung

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Carl Jung

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Carl Jung

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Carl Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Carl Jung

A ‘scream’ is always just that – a noise and not music.

Carl Jung

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

Carl Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Carl Jung

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Carl Jung

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

Carl Jung

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Carl Jung

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

Carl Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Carl Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Carl Jung

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

Carl Jung

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

Carl Jung

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Carl Jung

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

Carl Jung

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Carl Jung

The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Carl Jung

The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

Carl Jung

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. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Carl Jung

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Carl Jung

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

Carl Jung

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Carl Jung

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Carl Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Carl Jung

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.

Carl Jung

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

Carl Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

Carl Jung

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

Carl Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Carl Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung

A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

B. F. Skinner

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

B. F. Skinner

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren’t hungry, they wouldn’t work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

B. F. Skinner

I don’t deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn’t because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.

B. F. Skinner

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

B. F. Skinner

The environment shapes people’s actions.

B. F. Skinner

Religions work for their own aggrandizement – strengthen the church and so on – and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

B. F. Skinner

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by… worried… about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.

B. F. Skinner

I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.

B. F. Skinner

I won’t say that I’m an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know… but I’m not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.

B. F. Skinner

I don’t think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.

B. F. Skinner

I don’t know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.

B. F. Skinner

I think my novel, ‘Walden Two,’ has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

B. F. Skinner

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

B. F. Skinner

I never really expected to be controversial.

B. F. Skinner

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

B. F. Skinner

Reinforcement is being right.

B. F. Skinner

You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

B. F. Skinner

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

B. F. Skinner

What is sought can never produce the seeking.

B. F. Skinner

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

B. F. Skinner

I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.

B. F. Skinner

If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.

B. F. Skinner

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

B. F. Skinner

Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.

B. F. Skinner

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

B. F. Skinner

I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They’re not creating it; they’re not initiating anything. It’s all found somewhere else. That’s an awful lot to relinquish.

B. F. Skinner

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

B. F. Skinner

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

B. F. Skinner

I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.

B. F. Skinner

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

B. F. Skinner

If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.

B. F. Skinner

The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.

B. F. Skinner

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

B. F. Skinner

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

B. F. Skinner

When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

B. F. Skinner

The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

B. F. Skinner

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

B. F. Skinner

Even the mundane task of washing dishes by hand is an example of the small tasks and personal activities that once filled people’s daily lives with a sense of achievement.

B. F. Skinner

No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

B. F. Skinner

I’m very pessimistic.

B. F. Skinner

Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future – journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists – tend not to be powerful.

B. F. Skinner

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Abraham Maslow

With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It’s made up of pioneers, the beginners. That’s where the action is.

Abraham Maslow

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

Abraham Maslow

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

Abraham Maslow

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

Abraham Maslow

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

Abraham Maslow

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

Abraham Maslow

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Abraham Maslow

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Abraham Maslow

We may define therapy as a search for value.

Abraham Maslow

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

Abraham Maslow

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

Abraham Maslow

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Abraham Maslow

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Abraham Maslow

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Abraham Maslow

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

Abraham Maslow

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

Abraham Maslow

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

Abraham Maslow

Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don’t have to riot.

Abraham Maslow

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Abraham Maslow

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

Abraham Maslow

Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.

Abraham Maslow

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Abraham Maslow

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Abraham Maslow

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

I’m someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.

Abraham Maslow

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Abraham Maslow

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Abraham Maslow

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Abraham Maslow

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

Abraham Maslow

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Abraham Maslow

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Abraham Maslow

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