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

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.

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.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

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

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

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.

I’m addicted to placebos.

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

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

Character is expressed through our behavior patterns, or natural responses to things.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

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

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

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

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you’ll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

I have no human feelings.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

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

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‚continent,‘ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

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

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

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.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

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.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

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.

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.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Hatred is settled anger.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

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.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

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

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

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

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

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

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

Love is a serious mental disease.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.