The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your own body and get interested in someone else s.
Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides.
The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress.
The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear.
— Ovid
When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
— Plato
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.
A vigorous five mile walk will do more good for an unhappy, but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.