19th-century Psychologist Quotes

Sigmund Freud

John Dewey

William James

Alfred Binet

Gustave Le Bon

Wilhelm Dilthey

John B. Watson

In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.

Millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"- and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia.

If we designate as intelligence, quantitatively, the total of mental functioning, it is evident that the suppression of verbal thought involves a defect, relatively very important among cultivated individuals leading a complex social life: the uneducated person from this point of view is a defective.

Deep breathing brings deep thinking and shallow breathing shallow thinking.

Elsie Lincoln Benedict

Everything purposeful is meaningless, and everything meaningful is purposeless.

Put a thorn in every enjoyment, a worm in every gourd, that would either prevent my being wholly thine, or in any measure retard my progress in the divine life.

Thomas Cogswell Upham

It is evident, therefore, that one of the most fundamental problems of psychology is that of investigating the laws of mental growth. When these laws are known, the door of the future will in a measure be opened; determination of the child's present status will enable us to forecast what manner of adult he will become.

Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly – namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterized physically by fair color of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i. e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type,.... It is also called the Nordic type.

William McDougall

We should be on our guard against the temptation to argue directly from skill to capacity, and to assume when a man displays skill in some feat, his capacity is therefore considerable.

Tom Hatherley Pear

Only when he voluntarily chooses that which he inexorably must do, has man any free will at all.

Mary Esther Harding

Education is so much of an organic unity that, if any of the stages or elements of it be defective, the deficiency is felt throughout all the subsequent growth of the organism.

George Trumbull Ladd

You will never go wrong in concluding that a man has once loved deeply whatever he hates, and loves it yet; that he once admired and still admires what he scorns, that he once greedily desired what now disgusts him.

The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, 'How can I know what I think till I see what I say?'

It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

Science... deals exclusively with changes of configuration, and traces the accelerations which are observed to occur, leaving to metaphysics to deal with the underlying agency, if it exists.

C. Lloyd Morgan

All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

James Mark Baldwin

Not a few patients, however, suffering from certain forms of mental disorder, regain a high degree of insight into their mental condition in what might be termed a flash of divine enlightenment.

Clifford Whittingham Beers

Our general attitude toward life and our attitude toward sexuality cannot be separated. We cannot choose where we will build strongly and where we will disregard, for all the threads interweave to make the human pattern.

Frances G. Wickes

It's the same mathematics, whether it's applied or not. It's just important to think of a problem in a general context. I really think all mathematics is applicable.

Louis Leon Thurstone

Great as may be the potency of this [the experimental method], or of the preceding methods, there is yet another one so vital that, if lacking it, any study is thought by many authorities not to be scientific in the full sense of the word. This further and crucial method is that of measurement.

Charles Spearman

The world is as large as the range of one's interests. A narrow-minded man has a narrow outlook. The walls of his world shut out the broader horizon of affairs. Prejudice can maintain walls that no invention can remove.

Change is no modern invention. It is as old as time and as unlikely to disappear. It has always to be counted on as of the essence of human experience.

James Rowland Angell

When we study the structure of the atom, we shall arrive at the conclusion that it is an immense reservoir of energy solely constituted by a system of imponderable elements maintained in equilibrium by the rotations, attractions and repulsions of its component parts.

The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.

Edward Thorndike

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention... But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.