20th-century Psychologist Quotes

The use of available statistical records requires, first, that the social scientist be familiar with the better known sources of such data and that he display some ingenuity in discovering less obvious material.

I contend that most emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies.

Oliver James (psychologist)

Play Therapy is based upon the fact that play is the child's natural medium of self-expression. It is an opportunity which is given to the child to 'play out' his feelings and problems just as, in certain types of adult therapy, an individual 'talks out' his difficulties.

Virginia Axline

The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone.

You should prepare to follow the program for 90 days. Why? Because behavioral research indicates that it takes 90 days to prepare for change, build a new behavior, become confident in the face of high-risk triggers, and move past the likelihood of relapse. Brain research also suggests that it takes a few months of practicing a new behavior to create permanent change.

John C. Norcross

Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton.

Geoffrey Miller (psychologist)

As we have come to view teaching, it begins with an act of reason, continues with a process of reasoning, culminates in performances of imparting, eliciting, involving, or enticing, and is then thought about some more until the process can begin again

Causation depends on an extraordinary turning of reality at a particular instant such that one event transmutes into another.

The most successful executives are often men who have built their own companies. Ironically their very success frequently brings to them and members of their families personal problems of an intensity rarely encountered by professional managers. And these problems make family businesses probably the most difficult to operate.

There is no one right answer to creative problems.

For most of us even the imagined threat of criticism functions to control our behavior. We are haunted to some degree by questions about our self-worth. As a consequence, we continually attempt to prove to ourselves and others that we are okay people, credible, trustworthy, and competent.

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness

The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.

The idea that positive illusions are in the service of sef-esteem virtually requires that they stay in check. If one develops substantially unrealistic expectations regarding the future that greatly exceed what one is actually able to accomplish, then one is set up for failure and disappointment, leading to lower self-esteem.

Shelley E. Taylor

In going beyond what is already known, one cannot but go blindly. If one can go wisely, this indicates already achieved wisdom of some general sort.

Donald T. Campbell

A major part of the meaning of life is contained in the very process of discovering it.

Success in life does not necessarily originate with academic success.

Robert Sternberg

The addictive experience is the totality of effect produced by an involvement; it stems from pharmacological and physiological sources, but takes its ultimate form from cultural and individual constructions of experience.

In the midst of conflict, there is absolutely nothing that produces gains as dramatically as listening.

Neil Clark Warren

Every avenue which could lead to an increase of our knowledge deserves to be followed, regardless of the consequences. This is the professional code, or rather one of the professional codes, we find in men of science.

Women have always been healers. Cultural myths from around the world describe a time when only women knew the secrets of life and death, and therefore they alone could practice the magical art of healing... The emergence of women whose consciousness blends with the ancient themes of healing is the single most promising event in health care...

Jeanne Achterberg

We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different—cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness—but because our perception of them is different.

Androgyny is not trying to manage the relationship between the opposites; it is simply flowing between them.

Some adolescents are troubled and some get into trouble. But the great majority (almost nine out of ten) do not.... The bottomline is that good kids don't suddenly go bad in adolescence.

Laurence Steinberg

Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time that allows us to link the mind with the world.

Daniel Schacter