If you’ve been searching for the greatest psychology quotes ever, you’ve come to the right place. This post is dedicated to the best quotes about psychology from the greatest individuals of all time. From actual psychologists like Freud and Jung to renowned writers like Daniel Keyes and Charles Dickens, these quotes perfectly articulate the never-ending quest of human beings to better understand our minds and the minds of others. To boldly go where no brains have gone before. Enjoy:

  1. “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
  2. “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
  3. “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
  4. “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
  5. “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
  6. “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
  7. “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
  8. “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
  9. “It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.” –Ellen J. Langer
  10. “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
  11. “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
  12. “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
  13. “The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.” –Marcus Buckingham
  14. “Every person on this earth is full of great possibilities that can be realized through imagination, effort, and perseverance.” –Scott Barry Kaufmann
  15. “Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not our there is that it’s inside us.” –Sonja Lyubomirsky
  16. “When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.” –Shawn Achor
  17. “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
  18. “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 G. Jung
  19. “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
  20. “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
  21. “When we are open to new possibilities, we find them. Be open and skeptical of everything.” –Todd Kashdan
  22. “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
  23. “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” –Albert Schweitzer
  24. “Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated… the body sticks to the facts.” –Alice Miller
  25. “Becoming is better than being.” –Carol S. Dweck
  26. “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
  27. “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” –Charles Dickens
  28. “Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.” –David Richo
  29. “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” –Carl Gustav Jung
  30. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” –William Shakespeare
  31. “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
  32. “How hurtful it can be to deny one’s true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.” –June Ahern
  33. “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” –Viktor E. Frankl
  34. “The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.” –Jim Butcher
  35. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.” –Philip K. Dick
  36. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.” –Douglas Adams
  37. “…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
  38. “People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.” –Douglas Adams
  39. “We forget very easily what gives us pain.” –Graham Greene
  40. “Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.” –Marshall Rosenberg
  41. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.” –Eckhart Tolle
  42. “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
  43. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” –Daniel Kahneman
  44. “Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.” –Harshit Walia
  45. “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
  46. “Vulnerability is not knowing victory of defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.” –Brene Brown
  47. “…the sole purpose of human experience is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” –Carl Jung
  48. “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
  49. “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.” –C.G. Jung
  50. “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