85 Defense Mechanisms Quotes

Following is our list of defense mechanisms quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about coping mechanisms.

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Famous Defense Mechanisms Quotes

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial. — Dan Brown

Sadness is also a kind of defence. — Ivo Andric

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge. — Todd Solondz

the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct. — Melanie Klein

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness". — Alain de Botton

Protect yourself......from your own thoughts. - Rumi

Protect yourself......from your own thoughts. — Rumi

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning. — Karen Horney

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life. — Richard Paul Evans

Both dreams and neurotic dream-states have as their function the avoidance of displeasure, but the dream-states also serve to provide a positive pleasure gain. — Karl Abraham

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. — Mark Manson

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis. — Sigmund Freud

Humor is just another defense against the universe. — Mel Brooks

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. — Judith Lewis Herman

We either misdirect or depress great amounts of energy in order to keep ourselves from feeling pain, including what we feel in the moment and being who we are in the moment. — Barbara Brennan

The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding. — Oliver Burkeman

Short Defense Mechanisms Quotes

  • The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool. — Jane Wagner
  • Faith is a kind of immune system filtering out fears that otherwise would paralyze all activity. — Reinhard Bonnke
  • People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. — Carl Jung
  • Be vigilant; guard your mind against negative thoughts — Buddha
  • Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. — Sigmund Freud
Defense mechanisms quote Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

Freud Quotes

Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art — Salvador Dali

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence. — William Golding

I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. — Victor Frankl

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. — Joseph Campbell

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals. — Lewis Mumford

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. — R. D. Laing

I am not a fan of Sigmund Freud because his theories are not testicle. — Richard Wiseman

Coping Mechanisms Quotes

We're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Anxiety can often trace back to genetic mutations affecting neurotransmitters like serotonin, emphasizing the importance of addressing physiological roots over coping mechanisms. — Gary Brecka

Peace is not something you wish for, it's something you make — Robert Fulghum

My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor. — Max Brooks

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. — Chuck Palahniuk

When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions. — Ana Castillo

I didn't do drugs. It wasn't my thing. But the drink was terrible. Today when I look back, it's like I was another person. You could call it a coping mechanism, but that would be an excuse. I just drank too much. — Gary Oldman

I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism. — Ransom Riggs

Life is what happens when we are busy doing other things. Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are and something you give away. — John Lennon

One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. — Robert Fulghum

People Writing About Defense Mechanisms

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud
quotes on dreams, marriage and civilization

455 15250
Read quotes by Dan Brown

Dan Brown

226 997
Read quotes by Ivo Andric

Ivo Andric

23 302
Read quotes by Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz
quotes on life, happiness and love

61 239
Read quotes by Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein

10 787
Read quotes by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton
quotes on love, marriage and life

333 1611

More Defense Mechanisms Quotes

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. — Salman Rushdie

When the topic of food comes up in conversation with family, friends or casual acquaintances, it’s fascinating to hear the litany of rationalizations, knee-jerk defense mechanisms, self-limiting belief statements and general confusion or ignorance from otherwise intelligent folks when it comes to eating healthfully. But then again, Conventional Wisdom has often led even the best and brightest minds in nutritional science astray. — Mark Sisson

The shark is the apex predator in the sea. Sharks have molded evolution for 450 million years. All fish species that are prey to the sharks have had their behavior, their speed, their camouflage, their defense mechanisms molded by the shark. — Paul Watson

Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive. — Garry Shandling

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war. — Noam Chomsky

When you use defense mechanisms like 'Everything in moderation,' 'You only live once,' and the like, you disguise the fact that over years and decades, those little ice cream outings can add up literally to hundreds of pounds of ingested substances that are toxic to your body. — Mark Sisson

What are you going to do when you are not saving the world. — Hans Zimmer

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism. — Chester Himes

What are you going to do when you love music? You can't stop. — Peggy Lee

As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys, I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than by using your fists. — Tim Conway

My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it.That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive. — Judd Apatow

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't. — Marc Maron

I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat. — Anita Loos

I’m instantly mortified by my fat, uncontrollable mouth, but that’s when it occurs to me that my humor is a self-defense mechanism. Even though I may come off like a stark raving asshat, being funny is the most important tool I have to stay sane. The ability to say what I think is the key to allowing me to feel in control. — Jen Lancaster

Fear is a healthy instinct, not a sign of weakness. It is a natural self-defense mechanism that is common to felines, wolves, hyenas, and most humans. Even fruit bats know fear, and I salute them for it. If you think the world is weird now, imagine how weird it would be if wild beasts had no fear. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is a vulnerability that any woman has in a situation where you're surrounded by men in an enclosed space. You learn through time different defense mechanisms, and it could be for protection, for emotional, physical, everything. — Katee Sackhoff

I don't like smiley pictures. A smile is a defense mechanism. It says, You can't have the real me but here's my smile. You get closer to the real person when they stop smiling. — Chris Killip

I could always make people around me laugh. It was more of a defense mechanism more than anything else, because I was a pretty shy guy. — Tim Hawkins

Fashion has always been my defense mechanism. — Rihanna

The masks we wear are simply veils that we have chosen to hide behind in order to get our way, or to demonstrate how we are reacting to the powers and forces that seem to influence us from the external world. They are part of our self image, and in some cases the mask is nothing more than a protective device, a defense mechanism. — John Randolph Price

Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement. — Sam Keen

Nullification is not a 'defense' recognized by law, but rather a mechanism that permits a jury, as community conscience, to disregard the strict requirements of law where it finds that those requirements cannot justly be applied in a particular case. — David L. Bazelon

Nine times out of 10, criticism is a defense mechanism. We criticize in others what we don't like in ourselves. — Mark Batterson

[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions. — Karl Mannheim

If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really. — Dennis Lehane

Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique. — Monica Raymund

Humor was also a defense mechanism from getting picked on at school. If I could be funny maybe people wouldn't bother me. — Pandora Boxx

We often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us. — Vera Nazarian

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them. — David Icke

When my wife and I met, I couldn't talk to her - and my defense mechanism is sarcasm. I belittle someone with verbal pokes and prods. I did it to her out of complete awe. When friends introduced us, I said 'Hi' - and turned my back. Later, I called my mom and best friend and said, 'I think I just met my wife.' — Mike Vogel

All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists. — Steven Erikson

I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism. — Andy Dick

Crime is a human behavior problem, not a mechanical problem. Furthermore, if firearms were not very useful for self-defense, then police wouldn't carry them. In a free country, if the government can go armed, so should the citizens, if they so choose. — Charley Reese

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. — Eckhart Tolle

Humor is his defense mechanism, so that would allow me to talk about some serious subjects, but get a lot of hilarious jokes in. — Judd Apatow

If you look at the RNC, we had a very strong - at my suggestion and I give Reince Priebus credit for this - at my suggestion, because I know something about this world, I said I want a very strong defensive mechanism, I don't want to be hacked, and we did that. — Donald Trump

With comedy, a lot of people develop their sense of humor as a defense mechanism. — Judd Apatow

I don't really know. I think the first test is when you're very little and you fart, and you laugh at it and so do your friends and family. I knew before I was funny I was very annoying so I have that covered. I think it was because I was not very good in school I used humor as a defense mechanism. When I started doing plays and stuff at school I decided that I was going to keep doing it until someone tells me to stop and get a real job. — Joel McHale

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. — Randall Robinson

Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Americans made the decision out of principle to buy Russian equipment for us because our pilots and mechanics were trained on Russian aircraft. But, then, as a result of the Ukraine crisis, the US Congress imposed sanctions on Russia and the equipment could no longer be delivered to us. I am proud of our security and defense forces. — Ashraf Ghani

When I was younger, I was reticent to be vulnerable on camera and everything I was doing was just a really finely honed defense mechanism from when I was a kid, and I was now using this to make a living on camera. — Ryan Reynolds

I was the fat kid, so as a defense mechanism, I was the jokester. — Peter DeLuise

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters - and with much the same defensive mechanisms. — Barbara Walters

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