Some Thoughts About Psychological Matters 

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, This is going to take more than one night'." 

*****Charlie Brown*****

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man." 

*****Alexander Pope, 1733*****

"Part of myself is always that which I have taken in; we are all to some degree incorporations and extensions of others." 

*****Nancy Chodorow*****

"Men feel disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." 

*****Epictetus, First Century, C.E.*****

"It is the analyst's task constantly to tear the patient out of his menacing illusion and to show him again and again that what he takes to be new real life is a reflection of the past." 

*****Sigmund Freud*****

"Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous men really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior." 

*****B.F. Skinner*****

". . . the intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to promote the survival of human genes." 

*****E.O. Wilson*****

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with." 

*****Ernest Becker*****

"Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such an endless variety of forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct."  *****Henry Finck*****

"A proposal of marrige in our society tends to be a way in which a man sums up his social attributes and suggests that hers are not so much better as to preclude a merger or a partnership in these matters." 

*****Erving Goffman*****

"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success." *****Oscar Wilde*****

"It is a fallacy to assume that people, if left alone, follow a democratic pattern in their group life... In regard to changing from one cultural pattern to another experiments indicate that autocracy can be imposed upon a person. Democracy cannot be imposed upon a person; it has to be learned by a process of voluntary and responsible participation." 

*****Kurt Lewin, 1943*****