Harry Stack Sullivan Quotes

#1. Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#2. When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#3. It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is 'useful;' but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#4. What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those whom I love or refuse to love.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#5. I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#6. All of us are much more human than otherwise.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#7. What you know about the people whom you know at all well is truly amazing, even though you have never formulated it.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#8. If you do not feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#9. There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#10. We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#11. It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#12. The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#13. When people approach you angrily, you take them very seriously, and, if you're like me, with the faint suggestion that you can be angry too, and that you would like to know what the shooting is about.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#14. As you love yourself, so shall you love others. Strange but true, with no exceptions.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#15. There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#16. [O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient's, or the subject person's, private property.

Harry Stack Sullivan

#17. If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate.

Harry Stack Sullivan