Quotes About Behavior

The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

I was tempted to run down to the kitchen, but the memory of Dad's words stopped me. "Fearful, nervous, insecure"--wasn't that what he'd told Aunt Blythe? She'd already seen me behave like a baby once today. I didn't want to give a repeat performance.

And I entreat her who shall be in office, that she strive to precede the other Sisters more by virtue and holy behavior, than by her office, so that, touched by her example, they obey her, not so much from a sense of duty, as from love.

Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.

My grandma Ruth used to say there's a little felon in the best of us.

Vulgarity is the crutch of the weak and the ignorant,'" I snapped. "But what the fuck did she know?

you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat their dogs.

The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.

In the shapeliness of a life, habit plays its sovereign role.

The hyena has a reputation for being a thief and a coward.

People are messy, unpredictable things.

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women's college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, "People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.

This is what primate sex hormones do: "They make individuals perceive other individuals as more attractive than they'd normally perceive them." Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.

By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they've learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one. So

if you slip a rat's face and hide, Hannibal Lecter–style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it. (University of Alabama snake digestion expert Stephen Secor did this some years back to reenact a scene for National Geographic television. "Worked like a charm," he told me. "I can get a python to eat a beer bottle if I put a rat head on it.") For

He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter.

even in death, men couldn't be trusted to comport themselves respectably in the presence of a lady.

Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear to be irrelevant or even frivolous, it is nevertheless a deeply ingrained part of the human situation." The

The caption uses the scientific term for lip-licking: "lateral tongue protrusion.")

If it's exceedingly nasty," Reed told me, "they will actually drag their tongue on the bedding to try to get it off." Clearly taste matters to them.

The difference between dog and cat is immediately obvious. While a dog almost (and occasionally literally) inhales its food the moment it's set down, cats are more cautious. A cat wants to taste a little first. McCarthy directs my gaze to the kibble that has no palatant coating. "See how they feel it in their mouth and then drop it?

PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. "We need to know," says McCarthy. "'Are you down because you don't like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?'" Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. "So that's cutting into Porkchop's appetite." And probably yours.