Last Updated: September 7, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
Psychology is the study of the mind. One of the newest branches of science, psychology, studies human thought. Researchers in this field seek to understand why we do the things we do, what our personality has to do with our choices, and how and why we develop into the beings, we are. Studies also focus on our emotions, stress, and almost every other part of the human condition.
Inspirational quotes can offer fresh insights and perspectives on problems that everyone faces at one time or another. If you are looking for some quotes that might help you feel motivated or energized, you might want to start by taking a closer look at these from some of psychology’s best-known thinkers.
This post is dedicated to the best quotes about psychology from the most significant individuals. From actual psychologists like Freud and Jung to renowned writers like Daniel Keyes and Charles Dickens, these quotes perfectly articulate the never-ending quest of human beings better to understand our minds and the minds of others. To boldly go where no brains have gone before.
120 Psychology Quotes
Top 10 Psychology Quotes
“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” – Winston Churchill
“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“While some pain is probably inevitable in all relationships, successful couples are usually the ones who are able to forgive.” – Ilona Boniwell
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” – Abraham Maslow
“We forget very easily what gives us pain.” – Graham Greene
“Don’t become a mere recorder of facts but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.” – Ivan Pavlov
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” – Paul Romer
“We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.” – Sigmund Freud
“I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” – Abraham Lincoln
Famous Psychology Quotes
“If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.” – Nicholas Sparks
“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” – Lou Holtz
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.” – Andy Rooney
“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.” – Ellen J. Langer
“Life can show up no other way than that way in which you perceive it.” – Neale Donald Walsh
“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” – William Gibson
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” – William James
“Nothing in the world is so compelling to the emotions as the mind of another human being.” – Margaret Floy Washburn
“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.” – Louisa May Alcott
Funny Psychology Quotes
“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.” – Mo Willems
“Great spirits have often overcome violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein
“We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.” – Virginia Satir
“I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives.” – Dalai Lama
“The brain is wider than the sky.” – Emily Dickinson
“Much learning does not teach understanding.” – Heraclitus
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – Noam Chomsky
Positive Psychology Quotes
“For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.” – Harry F. Banks
“Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers; but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions.” – Dacher Keltner
“If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride.” – Karen Horney
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“Gratitude … goes far beyond saying “thank you.” When we are grateful, we affirm that a source of goodness exists in our lives.” – Robert Emmons
“Every person on this earth is full of great possibilities that can be realized through imagination, effort, and perseverance.” – Scott Barry Kaufmann
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” – Daniel Kahneman
“Discussing positive experiences leads to heightened well-being, increased overall life satisfaction, and even more energy.” – Nathaniel M. Lambert
“It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly light-hearted. Yet everyone takes the happy person for granted.” – Gretchen Rubin
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” – Mark Twain
“As for the future, it remains unwritten. Anything can happen, and often we are wrong. The best we can do with the future is to prepare and savor the possibilities of what can be done in the present.” – Todd Kashdan
“The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.” – Daniel Gilbert
“Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.” – Susan Cain
“The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.” – Marcus Buckingham
“If positive psychology teaches us anything, it is that all of us are a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. No one has it all, and no one lacks it all.” – Chris Peterson
“Follow your dreams. Figure out where you’d like to be, what you would like to be doing, and then figure out what you need to do to get there.” – Kennon Sheldon
“I’ve always believed that you can think positively just as well as you can think negatively.” – Sugar Ray Robinson
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” – William Shakespeare
“Don’t become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.” – Ivan Pavlov
Reverse Psychology Quotes
“When we encounter an unexpected challenge of a threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.” – Shawn Achor
“You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.” – Brian Tracy
“For happy people, time is ‘filled and planned’. For unhappy people time is unfilled, open, and uncommitted; they postpone things and are inefficient.” – Michael Argyle
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” – William James
“If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.” – Abraham Maslow
“Becoming is better than being.” – Carol S. Dweck
“Education survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.” – B.F. Skinner
“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” – William James
“Denial is a useful defense mechanism until it’s not.” – Rosalind Kaplan
“When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.” – Carl Rogers
Trading Psychology Quotes
“There is no single market secret to discover, no single correct way to trade the markets. Those seeking the one true answer to the markets haven’t even gotten as far as asking the right question, let alone getting the right answer.” – Jack Schwager
“If you can learn to create a state of mind that is not affected by the market’s behaviour, the struggle will cease to exist.” – Mark Douglas
“I know where I’m getting out before I get in.” – Bruce Kovner
“I always laugh at people who say, “I’ve never met a rich technician.” I love that! It’s such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for nine years and got rich as a technician.” – Marty Schwartz
“Losers average losers” – Paul Tudor Jones
“Do not anticipate and move without market confirmation—being a little late in your trade is your insurance that you are right or wrong.” – Jesse Livermore
“If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money.” – Bill Lipschutz
“Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.” – Steve Clark
“Throughout my financial career, I have continually witnessed examples of other people that I have known being ruined by a failure to respect risk. If you don’t take a hard look at risk, it will take you.” – Larry Hite
“Short term volatility is greatest at turning points and diminishes as a trend becomes established.” – George Soros
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, it’s how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” – George Soros
Child Psychology Quotes
“There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.” – Erik Erikson
“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.” – Jean Piaget
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” – James A. Baldwin
“There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.” – Erik Erikson
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.” – Carl Jung
“Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.” – Thomas Szasz
“Too-broad questions, such as, “What’s on your mind?” are apt to be answered “nothing” nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into “”psycho-speak,” however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you’re reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.” – Marge M. Kennedy
“I was a physical education major with a child psychology minor at Temple, which means if you ask me a question about a child’s behavior, I will advise you to tell the child to take a lap.” – Bill Cosby
“Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.” – Wilhelm Wundt
“If I wasn’t doing modeling, I’d like to study child psychology.” – Shanina Shaik
“I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.” – Steve Wozniak
Dark Psychology Quotes
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor Frankl
“Life isn’t about having, it’s about being. You could surround yourself with all that money can buy, and you’d still be as miserable as a human can be. I know people with perfect bodies who don’t have half the happiness I’ve found. … The “if I just had X, I would be happy” syndrome is a mass delusion. When you look for happiness in mere objects, they are never enough. Look around. Look within.”
Psychology Quotes About Love
“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” – Carl Rogers
“The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.” – Sharon Salzberg
“Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.” – Alice Miller
“Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being.” – Barbara L. Fredrickson
“Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.” – Jonathan Haidt
“It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.” – Lucille Ball
“Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.” – Erik Erikson
“Probably the biggest insight… is that happiness is not just a place, but also a process. Happiness is an ongoing process of fresh challenges, and it takes the right attitudes and activities to continue to be happy.” – Ed Diener
“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.” – Sigmund Freud
“Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” – Albert Schweitzer
“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.” – Julian Barnes
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” – Carl G. Jung
“Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship, mutual respect, and enjoyment of each others’ company.” – John Gottman
“Happiness, not money or prestige, should be regarded as the ultimate currency — the currency by which we take the measure of our lives.” – Tal Ben-Shahar
Psychology Quotes About The Mind
“Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.” – Brené Brown
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.” – Soren Kierkegaard
“We can regret less and be grateful for what is good in life.” – Barry Schwartz
“Compassion is one of the few things we can practice that will bring…happiness to our lives.” – Dalai Lama
“Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.” – Edward de Bono
“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.” – Harry Truman
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” – Thomas Jefferson
Psychology Quotes About Learning
“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.” – B.F. Skinner
“Hope has proven a powerful predictor of outcome in every study we’ve done so far.” – Charles Rick Snyder
“We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things.” – Sigmund Freud
“What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.” – Roy F. Baumeister
Psychology Quotes About Relationships
“When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.” – Shawn Achor
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.” – Stanley Milgram
“The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.” – Martin Seligman
“Once you start making the effort to “wake yourself up” – that is, be more mindful in your activities – you suddenly start appreciating life.” – Robert Biswas-Diener
“The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” – Wilhelm Reich
“When we are open to new possibilities, we find them. Be open and skeptical of everything.” – Todd Kashdan
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” – Chuck Palahniuk
Psychology Quotes On Human Behavior
“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 things that do not work.” – Thomas Edison
“We need each other. The sooner we learn that, it is better for us all.” – Erik Erikson
“Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us.” – Sonja Lyubomirsky
“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu
“Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.” – Charles Dickens
