Quotes About Behavior

Learning new things can be easy when there is no unlearning involved. But if the new learning has to displace some old habits of telling, two anxieties come into play that have to be managed. First, survival anxiety is the realization that unless we learn the new behavior, we will be at a disadvantage (metaphorically threatened by extinction). Survival anxiety provides the motivation to learn, even if it is mostly nervous energy.

One might argue then that in order to learn, one must increase survival anxiety, yet this only increases our overall tension because the sources of learning anxiety do not go away. To facilitate new learning, we need to decrease learning anxiety. We need to feel that a new behavior or practice is worthwhile, not threatening, and possible to learn.

Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult? THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

paradoxically, we often end up acting most on our feelings when we are least aware of them, all the while deluding ourselves that we are carefully acting only on judgments. And we are often quite oblivious to the influences that our feelings have on our judgments.

Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship

We know that negative reinforcement or punishment works well for behavior that should be eliminated. And we know from feedback theory that the best kind of feedback is descriptive because the client can then make the evaluation. These are valid guidelines but they don't solve some of the subtle issues that can arise in the relationship.

Minimize inappropriate encouragement.

Captain Billings," he drawled finally, "if you will pardon my candor, I might remark that you are something of an ass, don't you know.

When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

What counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

What is a vice? Merely a taste you do not share.

Boys wandered about in a condition of unnatural civility

The gentle mind by gentle deeds is known. For a man by nothing is so well betrayed, as by his manners.

In the criminal justice system you see the worst people on their best behavior, unlike the civil system, where the best people behave at their worst.

En serio. Haceme caso —insiste Federico—. Nunca subestimes la estupidez de la gente.

We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.

Does not mean merely a physical aggregation of a number of persons…the crowd is rather a state of mind.

Our opinions, young Englishman, are the angel part of us; our acts the earthly.

Thus sometimes we watch individuals acting for their own ends with little thought of their effect on society at large.