The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Thomas Szasz

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

Leadership, Children, Why

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

Love, Successful, Person

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Children, Living, Now

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Power, Authority, Should

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

Strong, Religion, Society

No further evidence is needed to show that ‘mental illness’ is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

Purpose, Mental Illness

Individual psychotherapy – that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship – requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

life, relationship

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.

Life, Want, Accept

The proverb warns that “You should not bite that hand that feeds you.” But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.

If you talk to God you are praying if God talks to you you have schizophrenia.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.