Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Seeking advice is a subtle way to invite someone to make a commitment to us.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

Without guilt or remorse, shame was an empty emotion. Indeed, shame would not be shame.

I'd learned long ago you had to block out the rush of regrets that followed the adrenaline dip after a fight. Otherwise the loop of thoughts could pull you under. Did you just kill someone? Or was it...

It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.

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 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.

Within the heart of every individual lies a fundamental and primordial fear that sometimes manifests as the fear of life and other times as the fear of death.

The very act of looking down on others made people more confident.

Being in love doesn't mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling so tenaciously to their hatreds is that they feel, once hatred has disappeared, they will be confronted with pain.

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

...three percent of all males are deemed to be antisocial and without conscience, while only one percent of females seem to lack compassion for others. But the icy manipulations of that one percent...

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Amy's basically exploiting the sociopath's most reliable maxim. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people...

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. {"America: Three Audiences"}

It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last...

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.

Is that which science calls the "psyche" not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing...

He feels the need to hear a human voice-a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion-his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.