#psycho

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil. ↗

— Robert Cormier

#heroes #humanity #love #psychology #robert-cormier

An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real -- it is a passing will o’ the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts ↗

— Nigel Hey

#life-lessons #mind #philosophy #psychology #reality

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#psychology #inspirational

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic? ↗

— Natalie Angier

#humor #psychology #humor

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane. Even if the dogs are small. ↗

— E. Lockhart

#humor #psychotherapy #sanity #humor

On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde. "Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me." "Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores. ↗

— Milton Rokeach

#psychoanalysis #santa-claus #schizophrenics #through-the-looking-glass #business

Don't normal people run in the rain? Even abnormal people, most of them anyway, the only people I can think of who walk in the rain are tree buffers, bag ladies, and total psychos. ↗

— Lisa O'Donnell

#rain #death

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#evolutionary-psychology #humor #humor

The field of psychotherapy is based on the premise that people can change, yet since the origins of psychology, the prevailing view has been that human beings are predetermined by forces outside of their control. ↗

— Cloe Madanes from The Violence of Men

#psychology #change

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#change