"According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
— William James, brother of Henry James

"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

"It's all in the mind."
— George Harrison

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. "
— Erich Fromm

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know."
— Carl Gustav Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

""It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.""
— Erich Fromm

"(Said of the Irish) "This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

(This quote may be misattributed as I have not yet found a reliable source that confirms that Freud made this comment about the Irish.)"
— Sigmund Freud

"The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness."
— Wilhelm Reich

"We forget very easily what gives us pain."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel."
— John Ruskin

"Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Blue Mars)

"Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it."
— Richard Adams (Watership Down: A Novel)

"He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running."
— Richard Adams (Watership Down: A Novel)

"For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said."
— Virginia Woolf

"All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war."
— Keith Ablow (Denial)

"The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary. "
— Wilhelm Reich

"When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together."
— John Berger

"She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference."
— Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs)

"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life."
— Wilhelm Reich

"He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"A man kept his character even when he was insane."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time."
— Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)

"People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think."
— Keith Ablow (Denial)

"Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment."
— Ian Fleming (Casino Royale)

"There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
"
— Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

". . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one."
— P.D. James (Original Sin)

"It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior."
— Scott Turow (Limitations)

"But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly."
— Keith Ablow (Denial)

"Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac."
— Keith Ablow (Denial)

"Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others"
— Eric Berne (Games People Play: The basic handbook of transactional analysis.)

"Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra o desprazer. Prazer e alegria de viver são inconcebíveis sem luta, experiências dolorosas e embates desagradáveis consigo mesmo. A saúde psíquica não se caracteriza pela teoria do nirvana dos iogues e dos budistas, nem pela hedonismo dos epicuristas, nem pela renúncia monástica; caracteriza-se, isso sim, pela alternância entre a luta desprazerosa e a felicidade, o erro e a verdade, o desvio e a correção da rota, a raiva racional e o amor racional; em suma, estar plenamente vivo em todas as situações da vida. A capacidade de suportar o desprazer e a dor sem se tornar amargurado e sem se refugiar na rigidez, anda de mãos dadas com a capacidade de aceitar a felicidade e dar amor."
— Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm)

"A vida brota a partir de milhares de fontes vibrantes, entrega-se à todos que a agarram, recusa-se a ser expressa em frases tediosas, aceita apenas ações transparentes, palavras verdadeiras e o prazer do amor"
— Wilhelm Reich (Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals 1934-1939)

"No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist."
— Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)

"Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts."
— Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm; Sex-economic Problems of Biological Energy)

"Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"If a man felt hostility and aversion, but saw that he had poor or no grounds for his feeling, the remedy was to look for good or at least better grounds--a search hid predisposing thoughts would help him in."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"He had been frightened and so he had been vehement."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"Through the ages, countless spiritual disciplines have urged us to look within ourselves and seek the truth. Part of that truth resides in a small, dark room -- one we are afraid to enter "
— Matthew J. Pallamary (The Small Dark Room of the Soul and Other Stories)