Psychological Distance Quotes

Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

Proximity doesn't breed familiarity.

. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

I don't take characters home with me.

The further from one another, the nearer one can be.

The distance at which all shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus sensation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man.

When you see a married couple walking down the street, the one that's a few steps ahead is the one that's mad.

There is two feet of space between us, and about a mile of separation.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

When we feel that we lack whatever is needed to secure someone else's esteem, we are very close to hating him

... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls." "There are always walls." I say.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

In every bed you will find four persons sleeping together. It is very rare to find a double bed, because then four persons are there overcrowding it. The wife is there and the ego, and the husband is there and the ego - husband is hidden behind his ego, wife is hidden behind her ego, and those two egos go on making love. The real contact never happens.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

The further you are from a problem, the smaller it gets.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.

I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

It's easy to endure adversity -- if it happens to someone else.

Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you're doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you'd give to another person in your predicament.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart