Top 100 Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

2. “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

3. “Autobiography of a Yogi is justifiably celebrated as one of the most entertaining and enlightening spiritual books ever written.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

4. “The more choices we have, the greater the need for focus.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

5. “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

6. “Burns lists ten “cognitive distortions,” such as all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and giving ourselves labels. By understanding these distortions, we are led to the awareness that “feelings aren’t facts,” they are only mirrors of our thoughts.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

7. “Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

8. “If you know a person’s personality type their behavior begins to make sense.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

9. “The cognitive psychology revolution has had a dramatic impact on mental health, and two of its major names are David D. Burns and Albert Ellis. Their mantra that thoughts create feelings, not the other way around, has helped many people to get back in control of their lives because it applies logic and reason to the murky pool of emotions.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

10. “In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

11. “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

12. “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

13. “What we think we lack determines what we will become in life.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

14. “Trust your intuition, rather than technology, to protect you from violence.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

15. “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

16. “Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Your.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The superego, Freud wrote, is the “mischief maker which prevents the ego’s coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts.” It.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

24. “Unlike other animals we are aware of our instincts, and as a result may attempt to shape or control them.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

25. “By the laws of probability, most decisions made under pressure should be flawed ones, yet psychologists have found that people routinely make correct judgments most of the time, even with limited information. One.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

26. “Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.” Steven Pinker.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

27. “As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone’s dignity intact.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

28. “It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy and insecurity that determines the goal of an individual’s existence.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

29. “Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant’s relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world. Most.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

30. “Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head. Between.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

31. “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

32. “People who use the sensing mode are engrossed in what is around them, look only for facts, and find it less interesting to deal with ideas or abstractions. Intuitive people like to dwell in the unseen world of ideas and possibilities, distrustful of physical reality. Whatever.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

33. “The fact that people don’t get along all the time suggests that we don’t understand or value the ways other people see the world. A.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

34. “Barry Schwartz’s distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

35. “A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

36. “The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

37. “Creative people take their intuition seriously, looking for patterns where others see confusion, and are able to make connections between discrete areas of knowledge.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

38. “But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

39. “When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

40. “Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

41. “A nation becomes great not by a mere imposition of order and power, but by letting go, knowing that there is much to gain by open discussion.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

42. “Harlow observed that when his baby monkeys grew up, they had many things wrong with them. Instead of the normal range of responses, they swung between clinging attachment and destructive aggression, often tearing at their body or shredding bits of cloth or paper. Even as adults they had to cling to soft, furry things, and did not seem to know the difference between living and inanimate objects. Though.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

43. “Burns helped to establish a new method of treatment, cognitive therapy, and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy is his attempt to explain how it works and why it is different. The.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

44. “50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

45. “Only 10 percent were middle class. The.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

46. “They may camouflage their true feelings in ingenious ways: To show that they are not vain, they may purposely pay less attention to dress or be overly modest. But.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

47. “Disenchantment is a malady, and even if it is caused by particular circumstances, it is wise to overcome it as soon as possible. The more things a person is interested in, the greater their chances of happiness.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

48. “While we are pushed by drives, we are pulled by meaning, and.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

49. “Though they could be affectionate to other monkeys, few were able to mate as adults, and those who did have offspring were not able to take care of them properly. Clearly, the lack of normal response from their fake mothers, and their isolation from other monkeys, had made them socially backward. They.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon

50. “The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious, and the outside world, but this does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego “wins” the person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.”

— Tom Butler-Bowdon