Top 55 Psychologists Quotes

I thought psychologists were people who rob, figuratively of course, money from the insecure. But they are not. They are people who are there to help you, and if you find a good psychologist, they will allow you to talk about everything and open up, without the slightest of fears, and that is no easy thing.

Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, ‘Hey, I love your books.’

It’s always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.

Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines – anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists – have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

If you asked a team of expert psychologists and sociological researchers to come up with a design that was sure to infuriate and offend liberals in America, they’d probably come up with what we call the Great Seal.

But what many psychologists have done, probably because they did well on a test themselves and everyone wants high self esteem, is to create this little box and then do their research inside it.

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions – depression, anger, anxiety – and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

A lot of athletes use sports psychologists.

People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don’t know. We don’t know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you’re not buying, it’s staring you in the face. Psychologists call this ‘salience.’

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

I don’t think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices.

When a story is flying along, and I’m so into it that my ‘real’ world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a ‘flow state,’ and it’s better than publication, money, awards, fame.

I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character’s sexuality is fascinating. It’s a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it’s such a personal thing.

One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should.

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells… and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

I don’t think ‘X Factor’ would put someone in front of the camera on purpose if they were ill. I don’t think that’s something they would do. There’s psychologists who test out all the contestants before they go on.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested – to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It’s called ‘corporate anthropology,’ but personally I’m more comfortable with ‘design research,’ because I’m not an anthropologist by training.

It was very hard for me to practice and enjoy my tennis, and I didn’t know the why, so I worked with psychologists to try and see what was happening. They pushed me really hard.

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds.

In Finland they are brilliant at ensuring no young person falls behind. From the day a child is born they are visited by health workers who assess their well-being and developmental. The health workers work with psychologists and speech therapists and aim to identify any problems at a very early stage.

Adolescence was only recognised as a life stage in the early 20th century, when psychologists got down to work. Today’s generational battle obscures the fact that adulthood is happening later. A new transitional stage has emerged after adolescence: the twenties.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we’re just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

Healthcare continues to move outside the hospital and into our homes and everyday lives. With leading doctors and psychologists, for example, we’ve developed personal health programs designed around patients to catalyze sustainable behavioural change.

What actors are involved in is a similar sort of psychological forensic examination of the characters they’re playing. You try to have an idea about why somebody does what they do and you try not to be in judgmental about it. That is what psychologists and psychotherapists aim to do with their patients.

My parents are psychologists. My father is a specialist with schizophrenia and my mother works with mostly children.

My book ‘Things Get Better’ has normalised the idea that it’s OK to fail and it’s OK to seek professional help from psychologists.

There are things that certain people aren’t supposed to talk about and they’re supposed to keep sheltered and go to psychologists and they try to figure them out on their own. But at the end of the day, we’re all human.

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever – stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Choosing a system is no longer enough, coaches have to be psychologists and motivational leaders too.

I suppose every filmmaker, at least the filmmakers I really like, are amateur psychologists to a degree. Or they come from a psychological approach, I guess.

Psychologists even have a term for this: they talk about ‘mean world syndrome’. People who have just seen too much of the news have become more cynical, more pessimistic, more anxious, even more depressive. So, yeah, I think that is something you need to be wary of.

I would hate to be in high school now. Psychologists talk about the ‘imaginary audience’ that teens seem to feel they have around them and that makes them think they have to keep up their image all the time. Now with Facebook and MySpace and 24/7 online access, that imaginary audience has become real.

Psychologists say don’t expect your life to be happy all the time. I go with the philosophy that every day can’t be tops. Life is not like that – it’s up and down.

I believe in greater self-sufficiency. International sport is tough, no doubt, but there shouldn’t be too many crutches. In most cases sports psychologists are crutches, and they tend to soften rather than harden the players.

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at ‘The Mail’ on Sunday in the U.K. and became a ‘ghost writer,’ collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies.

Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.

Many clubs use sports psychologists today. But you have to work with a mental coach for months. You can’t just start when you are in the World Cup.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

When top scientists and psychologists talk about what’s important to our overall wellbeing and how satisfied we are with our lives, the only thing that they all agree on is that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our overall happiness.