Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They read more

Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.

The greatest people will be those who possess the best capacities, cultivated with the best habits.

The greatest people will be those who possess the best capacities, cultivated with the best habits.

The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive read more

The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them.

People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by read more

Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.

...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful read more

...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.

We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It read more

We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It is they, above all who make plain the nature of our failure.

A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted read more

A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.

It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.

It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.