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In the search for knowledge and self-understanding, the right words can be just what you need to spark insight or inspiration. The best psychology quotes have the power to reframe your thoughts, shed light on your habits, offer hope, or simply remind you of truths you already know deep down.
This post brings together the best psychology quotes from some of the greatest minds in history. From legendary psychologists like William Stixrud and Carl Jung to celebrated writers such as Junot Díaz and Shonda Rhimes, these quotes capture the timeless human journey to understand ourselves and one another. Whether you’re seeking wellness advice, mental health support, or a bit of encouragement during tough times, we hope these words resonate with you and help you find what you’re looking for.
1. “You are stronger than you think. You have gotten through every bad day in your life, and you are undefeated.”
– Lori Gottlieb
2. “Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.”
– Harshit Walia
3. “Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.”
– Erik Erikson
4. “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.”
– Charles Duhigg
5. “A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others, but from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.”
– Ichiro Kishimi
6. “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”
– Junot Díaz
7. “The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
8. “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.”
– Albert Schweitzer
9. “Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
– Brené Brown
10. “It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”
– Ellen J. Langer
11. “We forget very easily what gives us pain.”
– Graham Greene
12. “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”
– Criss Jami
13. “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
– Carl Gustav Jung
14. “Deep breathing is our nervous system’s love language.”
– Dr. Lauren Fogel Mersy
15. “If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.”
– Abraham Maslow
16. “If I don’t poke my head out of my shell and show people who I am, all anyone will ever think I am is my shell.”
– Shonda Rhimes
17. “Once you start making the effort to ‘wake yourself up’—that is, be more mindful in your activities—you suddenly start appreciating life a lot more.”
– Robert Biswas-Diener
18. “We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and motives is not moral estimates but more knowledge.”
– Sigmund Freud
19. “Self-care is how you take your power back.”
– Lalah Delia
20. “If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”
– Jean Piaget
21. “Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances.”
– Viktor Frankl
22. “The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.”
– Marcus Buckingham
23. “Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”
– David Richo
24. “We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”
– B.F. Skinner
25. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”
– Soren Kierkegaard
26. “Probably the biggest insight… is that happiness is not just a place, but also a process. Happiness is an ongoing process of fresh challenges, and it takes the right attitudes and activities to continue to be happy.”
– Ed Diener
27. “You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything!”
– Eric Barker
28. “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
– Virginia Satir
29. “For happy people, time is ‘filled and planned.’ For unhappy people, time is unfilled, open, and uncommitted; they postpone things and are inefficient.”
– Michael Argyle
30. “Every person on this earth is full of great possibilities that can be realized through imagination, effort, and perseverance.”
– Scott Barry Kaufmann
31. “Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us.”
– Sonja Lyubomirsky
32. “Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you.”
– Nedra Glover Tawwab
33. “When we encounter an unexpected challenge or threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.”
– Shawn Achor
34. “The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.”
– Daniel Gilbert
35. “Be content with what you have. Rejoice in how things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
– Lao Tzu
36. “Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers; but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions.”
– Dacher Keltner
37. “When we are open to new possibilities, we find them. Be open and skeptical of everything.”
– Todd Kashdan
38. “It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly light-hearted. Yet everyone takes the happy person for granted.”
– Gretchen Rubin
39. “Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated… the body sticks to the facts.”
– Alice Miller
40. “I don’t know what’s worse: to now know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be and feel alone.”
– Daniel Keyes
41. “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
– Charles Dickens
42. “Becoming is better than being.”
– Carol S. Dweck
43. “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
– Carl G. Jung
44. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
– William Shakespeare
45. “How hurtful it can be to deny one’s true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.”
– June Ahern
46. “Start listening to the way you talk to yourself. These interactions will tell you how well you know yourself, how much you respect yourself, and what boundaries you are lacking.”
– Sara Kuburic
47. “The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.”
– Jim Butcher
48. “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
– Viktor E. Frankl
49. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
– Philip K. Dick
50. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”
– Douglas Adams
51. “…But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will turn wild and cause you grief.”
– Robert Greene
52. “People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”
– Douglas Adams
53. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.”
– Eckhart Tolle
54. “Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.”
– Marshall Rosenberg
55. “We live in a world where boredom is a dirty word, and people often compete to see who’s busier, as if their sense of self-worth could be measured by how little time they have.”
– William Stixrud
56. “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
57. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
– Daniel Kahneman
58. “We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection — which we have ourselves created.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
59. “Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person that you wish to become.”
– James Clear
60. “Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”
– Brene Brown
61. “…the sole purpose of human experience is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
– Carl Gustav Jung
62. “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
– Sigmund Freud
63. “To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”
– Carl Gustav Jung
64. “The gentlest reminder: You might not need to read another self-help book, attend another training, or bookmark another Instagram post as much as you need to listen to, trust, and practice what you already know. What if the answer you’re looking for is actually within you already?”
– Lisa Olivera
65. “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.”
– Thomas Szasz
