Quotes About Behavior

Commenting on an early paper by the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, the economist James Duesenberry famously quipped that "economics is all about choice, while sociology is about why people have no choices.

Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.

in order to teach a robot to imitate even a limited range of human behavior, you would have to, in a sense, teach it everything about the world.

if we want to understand why people do what they do, we must understand the incentives that they face, and hence their preference for one outcome versus another. When someone does something that seems strange or puzzling to us, rather than writing them off as crazy or irrational, we should instead seek to analyze their situation in hopes of finding a rational incentive.

If the first type of commonsense error is that our mental model of individual behavior is systematically flawed, the second type is that our mental model of collective behavior is even worse.

A good example is far better than a good precept.

Reaction" is convenient verbal shorthand for "I desire to behave in a particular way."—I may not act, you understand. But the impulse is with me. If, magically, all my restraints and inhibitions were to vanish, I'd embrace the woman, soothe the dog, throw out the cereal, weep or laugh or throw a temper tantrum.

Behavior, in turn, seldom stands neutral.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

My defensiveness in life really helps me as a driver.

In acting, I always try to go back to what would actually be the real situation, the real human behavior in life.

A person's life persuades better than his word.

Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.

Human life is full of the play of samskaras - tendencies developed by repeated actions.

Preach the Gospel with your life.

The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.

Playing the good guy is tough because you know as well as I do, in real life, you have to watch your P's and Q's and conduct yourself in a respectable manner if you expect to have friends.

This is a time in my life where I'm gonna behave like an elegant human being. Or not.

Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast.

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

People in life, when they have a tendency to exaggerate or lie or whatever, you always sort of notice that their voice goes up quite high.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.