Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

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.

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.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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.

Men are what their mothers made them.

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

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

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.

Hatred is settled anger.

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

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.

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

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

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.

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

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

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

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.

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

No one loves the man whom he fears.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

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

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

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

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

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.

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

I’m addicted to placebos.

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

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

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.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

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.

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

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

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.

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

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

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

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

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.

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

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