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

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.

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

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

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

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

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

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.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

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.

All of my favorite people – people I really trust – none of them were cool in their younger years.

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

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There’s a thing in psychology where they think if it’s popular, it can’t be serious.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

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

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

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.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

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.

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.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

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

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

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.

I like to use the hard times in the past to motivate me today.

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.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

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

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

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.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

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

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

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

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 worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

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

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

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

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.

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.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

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

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.