Tom Butler-Bowdon > Quotes

“Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life from Timeless Sages to Contemporary Gurus

“The more choices we have, the greater the need for focus.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life from Timeless Sages to Contemporary Gurus

“Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life from Timeless Sages to Contemporary Gurus

“The contribution of humanistic psychology to better relationships is recognized by the inclusion of Carl Rogers, whose influential book reminds us that relationships cannot flower if they don’t have a climate of listening and nonjudgmental acceptance, and that empathy is the mark of a genuine person.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon

“Trust your intuition, rather than technology, to protect you from violence.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon

“In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness; “a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy,” Adler noted.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Beck’s three principles of cognitive therapy were: All our emotions are generated by our “cognitions,” or thoughts. How we feel at any given moment is due to what we are thinking about. Depression is the constant thinking of negative thoughts. The majority of negative thoughts that cause us emotional turmoil are plain wrong or at least distortions of the truth, but we accept them without question.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“What we think we lack determines what we will become in life.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon

“Growing into an environment in which everyone else seems bigger and more powerful, every child seeks to gain what they need by the easiest route.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing: Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“Unlike other animals we are aware of our instincts, and as a result may attempt to shape or control them.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Between the stimulation received from the environment and our response, certain processes had to occur inside the brain, and cognitive researchers revealed the human mind to be a great interpreting machine that made patterns and created sense of the world outside, forming maps of reality.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that “moved toward people” or “moved away from people.” These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a “wholehearted,” or real, person.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Character” is the unique interplay between two opposing forces: a need for power, or personal aggrandizement; and a need for “social feeling” and togetherness (in German, Gemeinschaftsgefühl).”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“This idea originated with psychologist Carl Rogers (see p 238), who taught that nonjudgmental listening and acceptance of another person’s feelings create rapport. Applied”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“most of us can literally “choose” to be happy, if we understand the mind’s thought–emotion mechanism.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Your”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Truly creative people work for work’s own sake, and if they make a public discovery or become famous that is a bonus. What”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“If you have ever talked about having an “identity crisis” you have psychologist Erik Erikson to thank for inventing the term. Erikson”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“A fork in the developmental path leads a child either to imitate adults in order to become more assertive and powerful themselves, or consciously to display weakness so as to get adult help and attention.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority. A good upbringing should be able to dissolve this sense of inferiority, and as a result the child will not develop an unbalanced need to win at the expense of others.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“When the first force, social feeling and community expectation, is ignored or affronted, the person concerned will reveal certain aggressive character traits: vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, playing God, or greed; or nonaggressive traits: withdrawal, anxiety, timidity, or absence of social graces. When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet the forces also create an intensity or tension that can give tremendous energy.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon

“Her ego and id had fully lost the battle with her superego, and this was the only way they could be expressed.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement. This is the “pathological power drive,” expressed at the expense of other people and society generally. Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as a classic case of an inferiority complex in action.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“For Pascal, lack of faith was a kind of laziness, a view summed up by T.S. Eliot in his introduction to the Pensées: “The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books

“Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books

“Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists.”
― Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books