“My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that’s different – the special Homo sapiens bit – is faulty. It doesn’t work. Sorry about that.”— Sebastian Faulks
“He said sometimes when you’re young you have to think about things, because you’re forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you’re too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything, know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you’re forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn’t work, you can still find all the threads and pull them.But that’s not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don’t. CITs have a trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets.Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they’re gone and thinking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don’t remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it’s a personal problem.”— C.J. Cherryh
“What, then, was the new strategy he proposed? More troops and more money. For him, any other option was unthinkable. It would mean he had made a colossal mistake.”— Carol Tavris
“empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.”— Simon Baron-Cohen
“I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”— Simon Baron-Cohen
“As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”— Alain de Botton
“No one gets out of this life alive.So leave a footprint of your choice.You are writing your epitaph.You are writing it now!Life is a process, not a goal.Live it now, or you will miss it!We have time to spend and no time to waste.”— Charles Franklin
“Prospective research looks forward in time to see how a group of individual change over time while retrospective research looks backward in time and attempts to reconstruct the conditions that led to the current situation.”— Shelley E. Taylor
“Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.”— Antonin Scalia
“There is another Brain Principle to go with ‘First Things First’: that of‘Last Things Too’. This states that, all other things being equal, you willrecall more easily the ‘last’ things. Check your own memory banks andsee if this principle holds for the following.You will probably recall:? -The last new person you met? -The last time you saw the person you love the most? -The last social event you attended”— Tony Buzan
“It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle;”— Jane Austen
“I think it was Lessing who once said, ‘There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose’. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour”.”— Viktor E. Frankl
“Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative”.”— Viktor E. Frankl
“Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep.”— Heraclitus
“A truly intelligent person is not one who can simply spout wordsand numbers; it is someone who can react ‘intelligently’ to all theopportunities, simulations and problems provided by the environment.Real intelligence means engaging your brain with every aspect of life –you play sport with you brain; you relate to others brain-to-brain;”— Tony Buzan
“There’s one problem with all psychological knowledge – nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn’t work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained.”— Michael Crichton
“But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.”— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer.Memories r not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. they can be lost forever. It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting,I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.”— Lady Gaga
“The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”— Paul Valéry
“Good therapy, gently but firmly, moves people out of denial and compartmentalization. It helps clients to develop richer inner lives and greater self-knowledge. It teaches clients to live harmoniously with others and it enhances Existential consciousness, and allows people to take responsibility for their effects on the world at large. For me , happiness is about appreciating what one has. Practically speaking,this means lowering expectations about what is fair, possible and likely. It means,finding pleasure in the ordinary.”— Mary Pipher
“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.”— Jonathan Haidt
“You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment.”— Jonathan Haidt
“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”— Jonathan Haidt
“Crucially we haven’t been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we’re not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.”— Thandie Newton
“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”— Daniel Kahneman