#psychology

People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all--this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now. Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down...and neither can we. ↗

— Northern Adams

#construct #morality #psychology #life

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure. ↗

— Ellen Glasgow

#analysis #pathology #psychiatrist #psychiatry #psychologist

For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this? ↗

— Thomas Gilovich

#human-behavior #logic #mind #psychology #life

Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. ↗

— Cacilda Jethá

#monogamy #science #science

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs. ↗

— Antonin Scalia

#science

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

— C.G. Jung

#psyche #psychology #bad

deep breathing brings deep thinking and shallow breathing shallow thinking. ↗

— L Elsie Benedict

#science #science

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ↗

— James Baldwin

#attachment #belonging #comfort #completion #fulfillment

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. ↗

— Daniel Kahneman

#science #social-behavior #science

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#psychology #science #science