K Horney Quotes & Sayings

We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. — Karen Horney

He had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course - what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors! — Elizabeth Strout

Why is it so unutterably beneficial, the thought that someone besides myself knows me? — Karen Horney

Life as a therapist is ruthless; circumstances that are helpful to one neurotic may crush another. — Karen Horney

No one ... can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time — Karen Horney

There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live. — Karen Horney

To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship. Spurious tranquillity rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. It is bound to make us weak and an easy prey to any kind of influence. — Karen Horney

Through the eclipse of large areas of the self, by repression and inhibition as well as by idealization and externalization, the individual loses sight of himself; he feels, if he does not actually become, like a shadow without weight and substance. — Karen Horney

Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men. — Karen Horney

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement? — Karen Horney

The psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men. — Karen Horney

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself. — Karen Horney

A normal human being ... does not exist. — Karen Horney

Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression. — Karen Horney

If I couldn't be pretty, I decided I would be smart. — Karen Horney

Until I feel strong enough to pray sincerely and to act accordingly, I would rather not pray at all. — Karen Horney

To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown. — Karen Horney

There is no such thing as a normal psychology that holds for all people. — Karen Horney

Because it corresponds to a vital need, love is overvalued in our culture. It becomes a phantom - like success - carrying with it the illusion that it is a solution for all problems. — Karen Horney

The view that women are infantile and emotional creatures, and as such, incapable of responsibility and independence is the work of the masculine tendency to lower women's self-respect. — Karen Horney

You're a classic case of Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving. — Luke Rhinehart

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

The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings, one's work, one's beliefs. — Karen Horney

When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling. — Karen Horney

Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict ... Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life. — Karen Horney

What luck! If the theories of Epictetus, Karen Horney (who first talked about the "tyranny of the shoulds"), Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics), and REBT are correct, you almost always bring on your emotional problems by rigidly adopting one of the basic methods of crooked thinking - musturbation. Therefore, if you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything. — Albert Ellis

That many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing. — Karen Horney

It would not be going too far to assert that ... conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and who is ... unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity. — Karen Horney

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it. — Karen Horney

To search for truth about self is as valuable as to search for truth in other areas of life. — Karen Horney