Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
—Edward Thorndike
Eating is never so simple as hunger.
—Erica Jong
Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
—Edward De Bono
Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
—Rita Rudner
Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation.
—Walter Winchell
Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
—David Sedaris
A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious.
—Robert Johnson
You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.
—Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides
A broken leg can be remembered and located: "It hurt right below my knee, it throbbed, I felt sick at my stomach." But mental pain is remembered the way dreams are remembered—in fragments, unbidden realizations, like looking into a well and seeing the dim reflection of your face in that instant before the water shatters.
—Tracy Thompson
To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation"—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
—Aldous Huxley
Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.
—Lou Holtz
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
—Edward Gibbon
After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes: "No hablo inglés.
—Ronnie Shakes