Quotes About Behavior

know the law of human nature: acts produce habits, habits breed dispositions, dispositions form the will, and the rightly-formed will is character.

We know the law of human nature: acts produce habits, habits breed dispositions, dispositions form the will, and the rightly-formed will is character.

It is mad for adolescents to rage at parents who have done their best, but it is a conventional madness, uniform enough so that we tolerate it relatively unquestioningly.

I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for the circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost his color (octopuses' states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviours that make you crazy? Or is it crazy to medicate so that you can sustain a life that makes you crazy?

It's the movies that have been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people.

If we are going to persuade victims to come forward, we must rethink how manhood and womanhood are defined and how both definitions create unrealistic and unsafe demands on our behavior, starting when we're children.

Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.

She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway.

Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army. Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.

The creation of an idol is textbook mob behavior. Crowds, Le Bon says, can only grasp the "very simple and very exaggerated."2 They respond to images that "assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape."3 And so, just as Clinton and Obama, for example, represented everything good to the mob, Reagan and Bush represented everything loathsome.

Aunt Cecelia would have pulled a tissue out of her sleeve, but I let Becca be sloppy.)

Shannon stopped prancing and tucked herself into a perfect sit. I smacked

Imani's sit command worked the first time for every dog except the bull terrier and the dachshund, who clearly had minds of their own. Britty finally sat, but she looked like a small coiled spring about to leap into the air. When Shug, the bull terrier, eventually responded to her owner's gentle pressure, she swung her back end around so that it rested on her owner's foot.

The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behavior would make absolutely no sense; with them, it becomes perfectly understandable, even rational.

Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives. To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.

But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of "acting spiritual" and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.

a person who commits each of these sins with abandon.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests "historical" or "journalistic"; and when a person's commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being "religious.

From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behaviour of one's ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.