Psychological Defense Quotes

Humor is an escape, because you cannot think about your problems when you are trying to be funny; so, in essence, "being a humorist" gives you a valid excuse to hide from your pain.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time - the mind, protecting its sanity - covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.

Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Let's be honest: Ignoring is acting, and nothing more — acting as though the words or actions of your oppressors don't hurt. You hear the words, you feel the insults, and you bear the blows.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

I have this fear of clowns, so I think that if I surround myself with them, it will ward off all evil.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise, we would never have won.

No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.

Arrows of hate have been aimed at me too, but they have never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world with which I have no connection whatsoever.

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Because I know that hope and fear are connected, I put my mask of hope on.

It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?

I hypnotized myself so in my subconscious, I believed I couldn't get hurt. And I don't mean 'believe' - I mean believe believe believe.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Psychologically, it's better that I think that I'm dirt.

So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping.

A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

The ego does not want to be wrong, ever.