Psychologist Quotes

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.

Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

While waiting for a Moses to lead us into the promised land, we have forgotten how to walk.

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

We're born man, woman and sexual beings.

We learn our sexual preferences and orientations.

Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian.

In an area where nothing was known, medicine had to draw on social lore.

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

I had a patient once who dreamed she kept her husband in the deep freeze except for mating. Lots of men feel that way.

History seems to be so clumsy.

History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that.

If she has a good, strong, reliable father image, which is hard to find these days, that will be her image of men, probably for the rest of her life. She'll look for a husband who embodies those qualities.

A man will treat a woman almost exactly the way he treats his own interior feminine. In fact, he hasn't the ability to see a woman, objectively speaking, until he has made some kind of peace with his interior woman.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.