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.

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

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

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.

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

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.‘

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

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.

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

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

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.

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

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

I did work in a strip club, but I didn’t strip. I danced, and I became very popular.

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.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

A President cannot always be popular.

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

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

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

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

Hatred is settled anger.

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

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

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

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.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

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.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

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

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