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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I have no human feelings.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man’s actions.

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

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you’re nuts, and you’re not as popular with girls as you should be.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

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

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.

Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

I don’t think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It’s lonely out here.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

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.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

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

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.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

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

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.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Hatred is settled anger.

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

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

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

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

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

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 really believed that fear is contagious.

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

I was never a boy magnet at school. There was always the girl all the guys liked and wanted to date, but it was never me.

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

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.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

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

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

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

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.

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

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.