American Psychologist Quotes

Sometimes you have to give up an intense heat for a continuing warmth.

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.

Success in life does not necessarily originate with academic success.

In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.

Liz Murray
Liz Murray
Of all our basic virtues, courage is the one that helps us to live exactly the way we want and provides the psychological fuel we need to create, take risks, help others, and face hard times... Courageous action is humanity at its finest.

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

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.

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.

Melanie Joy
Melanie Joy
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
Laurence Steinberg
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.

Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.

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.

Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today.

William Damon
William Damon
Awe is not a very comfortable standpoint for many people... Hence, all about us today, we see avoidance of awe-by burying ourselves in materialist science, for example or in absolutist religious positions; or by locking ourselves into systems, whether corporate, familial, or consumerist; or by stupefying ourselves with drugs.

If the null hypothesis is not rejected, [Sir Ronald] Fisher's position was that nothing could be concluded. But researchers find it hard to go to all the trouble of conducting a study only to conclude that nothing can be concluded.

In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.

There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.

If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse, boom.

Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.

The real relatedness between two people is experienced in the small tasks they do together: the quiet conversation when the day's upheavels are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small gift when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love.

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.

When evaluating the reliability and generality of data, it is often important to know the aims of the experimenter. When evaluating the importance of experimental results, however, science has a trick of disregarding the experimenter's rationale and finding a more appropriate context for the data than the one he proposed.

In skydiving, it is the fear response that gradually weakens. During the precipitous descent, the amply tested parachutist can savor the thrill rather than endure the panic.

Wonderful ideas cannot spring out of nothing. They build on a foundation of other ideas.