“There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.””

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release.

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions.

[As] Santayana wrote, ‘Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one’s equation written out.’

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

The dog [in Pavlov’s experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell.

A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947)

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.

And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system.

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

If my resolution to be a great man was half so strong as it is to despise the shame of being a little one.

Part of our society kills what it loves, despises what it’s created. It really hates success.

Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.

I despise politics. There is no room for it in a company. My life is going to be way too short to deal with that.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.