Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

There is only one form of approaching that does not prevent individual development, does not cause friction or a lack of energy — it is mature love. I mean a complete intimate relationship between...

People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of...

The more the feeling of incapacity and the lack of genuine will increase, the more submission or obsessive desire to please one's whims and insistence on choosing proliferates.

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object"...

Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.

We all create stories to protect ourselves.

More lies, but maybe lies were better than the truth.

They don't hate us, Bobbie said, her voice tired. They're afraid of us. Then why do they act like they hate us? David's father said with something like triumph. Because that's what fear looks like...

He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed...

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a...

Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing...

The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all. No judgment...

When people believe a tale that conflicts with self-checkable evidence it tells me that people undervalue the role of evidence on formulating an internal belief system. Why this is so is not clear,...

Boys are good at personas. There are a certain number that you can get at the drugstore, like costumes before Halloween. Being cool is pretending that you're not afraid of anything. But everybody is...

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

if you have been assaulted by somebody you thought you could trust, how do you restore your sense of trust in the world or in people? And how do you trust yourself?

The average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images...

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.

For starters, circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they've first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized,...

Through a process of transference, leftists blame their victims for being and doing what they themselves are and do. In a sick inversion, the real fascists in American politics masquerade as...

While your intellect went to prep school, your unconscious remained in the jungle where it is still swinging in the trees! Looking

You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all.

I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them.