Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

People love conspiracy theories.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater ones – with ingratitude.

I hate the past – especially my own past.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.