Unconscious Motives Quotes

People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

There are more reasons for people's actions than the number of actions that are actually set in motion.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

I think that human beings, even the ones who are sometimes hurting you, are often very, very confused at their center.

We act in ways that are mysterious to ourselves.

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

People read so much into what I do. It's fascinating to me because some of it's probably there, but I haven't thought of it.

Was Deirdre right about me purposely wanting relationships that were impossible?

I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

The reasons for public sentiment are often more unconscious than conscious.

all the advice you ever gave your partner is for you to hear

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

You never know what motivates you.

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

The Freudian tradition will never completely die because it has a few good points. For example, people have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Most of cognitive therapy has now adopted a similar idea. On the other hand, the relationship part of psychoanalysis - where you must have a deep, emotional relationship with the client - will, I think, get kicked in the teeth one of these days.

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

The books are the books, and a lot of the stuff is some version of your id or your ego.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.