Psychology

Robert Abelson (in Beliefs are like possessions, 1986) - Beliefs are objects which provide values to their owners. The bases for these values have little to do with the probable truth of the beliefs. This is a crucial fact both psychologically and sociopolitically.

African proverb - The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

Alphonse Allais - Pourquoi faire demain ce que l'on peut faire après demain?

Woody Allen (in Annie Hall, 1977) - I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

Dan Ariely - As something becomes more familiar to us through repetition, our brain starts to process that information more efficiently—and we mistake this faster processing for liking something. (Mere exposure effect)

Elliot Aronson (1969) - Man is a rationalizing animal.

Robert Benchley - Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing.

Milton Berle - Laughter is an instant vacation.

Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (in Histoire des variations des Eglises protestantes, 1688) - Dieu se rit des prières qu'on lui fait pour détourner les malheurs publics, quand on ne s'oppose pas à ce qui se fait pour les attirer. Que dis-je ? quand on l'approuve et qu'on y souscrit, quoique ce soit avec répugnance. Commonly misquoted as: Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes.

Jacques Brel (in Les gens, 1953) - Les gens qui ont bonne conscience ont souvent mauvaise mémoire. 

H. Jackson Brown (1990) - The optimist goes to the window every morning and says, ‘Good morning, God.’ The pessimist goes to the window and says, ‘Good God, morning.'

David Buss (1995) - Humans are living fossils—collections of mechanisms produced by prior selections pressures.

G. K. Chesterton (in What’s Wrong with the World, 1910) - If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

G. K. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy, 1908) - This is why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old Fairy Tales endure forever. The old Fairy Tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.

Chinese proverb - Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - Emotions are Darwinian algorithms of the mind.

Theodore Dalrymple - It is more pleasurable to enforce virtue than to exercise it.

Theodore Darlymple - Expanding so called mental health services will always resemble an animal chasing its own tail. The supply creates its own demand. 

Jean Delumeau - Aucune espèce animale n’aurait survécu sans la peur.

Daniel Dennett - The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Daniel Dennett - Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

Edsger Dijkstra - Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

David Eagleman - It turns out your conscious mind — the part you think of as you — is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

Benedict Evans - The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (in The Crack-Up, 1936) - The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1938) - That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Alison Fragale & Chip Heath (2004) - The more times one is exposed to a particular statement, the more one is likely to believe the statement to be true. This relationship between repetition and perceived truth is mediated by familiarity; repetition increases familiarity and, in turn, familiarity is used as a heuristic for determining the truth of a statement.

Benjamin Franklin (in Poor Richard’s Almanack) - Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Jesse Frederik - Beliefs formed on insufficient evidence seem tough to move.

Sigmund Freud (in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, 1905.) -  [This was] the defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had never borrowed the kettle from B; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had returned it undamaged." German original: A hat von B einen kupfernen Kessel entlehnt und wird nach der Rückgabe von B verklagt, weil der Kessel nun ein großes Loch zeigt, das ihn unverwendbar macht. Seine Verteidigung lautet: »Erstens habe ich von B überhaupt keinen Kessel entlehnt; zweitens hatte der Kessel bereits ein Loch, als ich ihn von B übernahm; drittens habe ich den Kessel ganz zurückgegeben. In French, known as la logique du chaudron : A a emprunté à B un chaudron de cuivre et après l'avoir rendu, il est mis en accusation par B parce que le chaudron présente désormais un grand trou qui le rend inutilisable. Voici sa défense : “Premièrement je n'ai absolument pas emprunté de chaudron à B; deuxièmement le chaudron avait déjà un trou lorsque je l'ai reçu de B; troisièmement je lui ai rendu le chaudron intact".

Nathaniel Friedman - Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

Paul Fussell - To become disillusioned you must earlier have been illusioned.

Bill Gates - Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Gerd Gigerenzer (in Gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious, 2007) - We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions.

Roger Gould (in Collision of wills, 2003) - The default assumption in many natural sciences is that until a potential factor has been shown to be important, it is assumed not to be. In the human sciences, the contrary holds: one must demonstrate that a factor is not relevant before disregarding it.

Walter Gropius - The mind is like an umbrella. It is most useful when open.

Jonathan Haidt - Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

Edward Hall (in The Silent Language, 1959) - What people do is frequently more important than what they say.

Robin Hanson (2019) - To a useful approximation, humans want to be comfy, healthy, fed, warm, respected, and loved. But I think a better approximation is that humans try to avoid being open to criticism. They work harder at blocking others' criticisms than they do at any other goal.

Tim Harford - Negativity makes evolutionary sense: the secret of happiness may be to focus on what’s going well, but the secret of survival is to pay attention to what’s going badly.

Rob Henderson (2020) - Some people interpret behavior genetics findings to mean environment is unimportant. I interpret them to mean certain aspects of environment matter even more. Norms and customs constrain differences between individuals. The absence of norms magnifies them.

Alfred Hitchcock - Suspense consists of letting an audience know precisely what is about to happen, and then making them wait for it.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

David Hull (in Science and Selection, 2001) - The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then.

Insurance claim (reported in the Toronto News, 1977) - A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.

Italian Proverb - Chi va con lo zoppo impara a zoppicare. (English: Whoever goes with the lame learns to limp. French: Qui fréquente un boiteux apprend à boiter.)

William James - In general time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Daniel Kahneman (2018) - There is a lot of psychoanalysis in Argentina, and there’s no indication that it makes them more sane.

Wrongly attributed to Immanuel Kant - French: On mesure l'intelligence d'un individu à la quantité d'incertitudes qu'il est capable de supporter. English: Someone’s intelligence can be measured by the quantity of uncertainties that he can bear. German: Die Klugheit eines Menschen wird daran gemessen, wie viel Unsicherheiten er zu ertragen vermag.

Maria Konnikova (in The Confidence Game, 2015) - The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (in Metaphors We Live By, 1980) - Reality exists, but so does the unconscious system of metaphorical thought that we use without awareness to comprehend reality.

Charles Mackay (in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841) - Men (...) think in herds; (...) they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Bob Mankoff - The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of perfection are mutually exclusive.

Chris Marker - L'humour est la politesse du désespoir.

Groucho Marx - Alcohol doesn't solve any problems, but then again, neither does milk.

François Mauriac (in Le feu sur la terre, 1950) - Moins les gens ont d'idées à exprimer, plus ils parlent fort. English: The fewer their ideas, the louder people speak.

Seymour Halleck (1966) - In frontier societies or under conditions of relative lawlessness, the psychopath has a higher survival potential than many other individuals. Even in the prison or mental hospital many psychopaths have the capacity to create a comfortable niche for themselves.

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber (2011) - The function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. (...) Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias.

Alfred de Musset - Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse.

Randolph Nesse & George Williams (in Why We Get Sick, 1994) - The cost of getting killed even once is enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.

Randolph Nesse (in Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, 2019) - Emotions are specialized states that adjust physiology, cognition, subjective experience, facial expressions, and behavior in ways that increase the ability to meet the adaptive challenges of situations that have recurred over the evolutionary history of a species.

Randolph Nesse - Modern life is seen as especially stressful and around 20 per cent of people experience low moods severe enough to be diagnosed as depression; however, our ancestors undoubtedly faced more stress than we do. Although family networks were stronger in the past, our ancient ancestors had no police, no food reserves, no medicine and no laws. Infections were rampant and 50 per cent of babies typically died before adulthood. Around 16 per cent of women died in childbirth. Most of us lead lives that exceed our ancestors’ wildest fantasies. We have fabulous food and as much of it as we want. Central heating keeps us warm. Most miraculous, our children are unlikely to die. We have what we thought would make us happy, but depression is common.

Maud Newton - I don’t think of it as procrastination. I think of it as allowing my work to accumulate urgency.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil - 146) - He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. (German original: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein. French: Celui qui doit combattre des monstres doit prendre garde de ne pas devenir monstre lui-même. Et si tu regardes dans un abîme, l'abîme regarde aussi en toi.)

Friedrich Nietzsche (in The Will to Power) - No artist tolerates reality. (German original: Ein Künstler hält keine Wirklichkeit aus.)

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Ecce Homo) - It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad... (German original: Nicht der Zweifel, die Gewissheit ist das, was wahnsinnig macht…)

Lionel Page - Reason likely did not evolve to help us be right, but to convince others that we are.

Mark Pincus - Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed.

Steven Pinker - A neural network that’s too dense actually is stupider.

Steven Pinker - You actually put a person in a situation where there’s real money at stake, and all of a sudden they’re not so irrational.

Jean Renoir (in La règle du jeu, 1939) - Tu comprends, sur cette Terre, il y a quelque chose d’effroyable, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons.

Will Rogers - If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Andrew Salomon - The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.

Robert Sapolsky - The dopamine system constantly resets and habituates. This is the tragic predicament of the human condition. Whatever was a great unexpected reward yesterday is what you feel entitled to today and will feel insufficient tomorrow.

Judith Shklar (in The Liberalism of Fear, 1989) - To be alive is to be afraid.

Arthur Schopenhauer - Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Coltan Scrivner - Laughter at something signals that you have similar perspectives on the issue raised in the joke. It's a signal of group cohesion/coalition.

Sénèque - Il n’y a pas de vent favorable à celui qui ne sait pas où il va.

Thomas Sowell - When people are confronted with a choice between hating themselves for their stagnation or hating others for their progress, they seldom hate themselves.

Mme de Staël - La gloire est le deuil éclatant du bonheur.

John Steinbeck (1947) - Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Steve Stewart-Williams - Psychology has made a lot less progress than it could have because too many psychologists know too little about other animals.

Steve Stewart-Williams (in The ape that understood the universe, 2018) - Our basic drives and motivations led our ancestors to act in ways that typically propagated their genes in the environment in which our species evolved. These motivations may or may not accomplish this goal in our current environment.

Tom Stoppard (in the late 60s) - I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Upton Sinclair - It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Will Storr (in The Science of Storytelling, 2019) - We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds.

Carol Tavris (in Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, 2002) - Pseudoscience is popular because it confirms what we believe; science is unpopular because it makes us question what we believe. Good science, like good art, often upsets our established ways of seeing the world.

Traditional - The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.

Wilfred Trotter (1941) - The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Amos Tversky - My colleagues study artificial intelligence; I study natural stupidity.

John Wanamaker (Department-store magnate, 1838-1922) - Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted—I just don’t know which half.

E. B. White - Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde - Be yourself.  Everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde - I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.

D. W. Winnicott - May I be alive when I die.

Virginia Woolf (in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 1931) - It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Yiddish saying - Many complain of their looks, but none of their brains. (Nit yeder iz tsufriden mit zein ponem, ober mit zein saichel iz yeder tsufriden.)

Yiddish saying - An imaginary illness is worse than a real one. (A moshel iz nit kain rai'eh.)

Yiddish saying - Give a pig a chair, he’ll want to get on the table. (Az me lozt a chazzer aruf afn bank, vil er afn tish.)

Yiddish saying - The body is a sponge, the soul an abyss. (Der guf iz a shvom, di neshomeh a tehom.)

Yiddish saying - The world is full of troubles, but each man feels his own. (Di velt iz ful mit tsores, nor yederer fielt nor zeineh.)

Henny Youngman - When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

Carl Zimmer - Of all the species on Earth, only humans possess . . . the ability to infer what others are thinking.