psychology

People can learn to be more optimistic by acting as if they were more optimistic.

But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A month later he was back in France, this time for an extended stay.The optimistic dawn of his revolutionary adventures was coming to an end, and his dark night of the soul was about to begin.

Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history. It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered.

The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity.

The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a __egative path_ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions__r, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.

We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don__ have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn__ sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That__ what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.

There is only one "now." Realize how rich you are in it. Right now you are creating history_your legacy. Make your time count. Do not wish your moments away. Do not ruin today by focusing on another time and place. If we counted our blessings more often, instead of our money, we would be a lot richer. Keep money on your mind but out of your heart. Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life for yourself. Cultivate your spiritual growth. The real measure of your wealth is how much you__ be worth if you lost all your money.

Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up.

Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talking about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advance, they are master manipulators.

I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything.

James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.

Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes and pressing on to occupy a large swathe of Belgium and threaten Holland. For Britain, this changed everything: a French republic that spread across the North Sea coast meant the entire coastline facing Britain would be in Republican hands.