Quotes About Behavior

When Sandy said, "My parents don't know how to love me," she was saying that they don't know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy's parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call "love" rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.

Because these parents so often behave like helpless or irresponsible children, their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parents' defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator.

The more we understand what shaped us as individuals, the more tools we have to free ourselves from behaviors that no longer work for us.

A man who is raised by a misogynistic father can absorb his father's contempt for women very early in life. The boy learns that a man must always be in control of women and that the way to get that control is to scare them, hurt them, and demean them. At the same time, he learns that the one sure way to get his father's approval is to behave as his father does.

While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.

I vomited neatly into the corner basin. That made me feel better, and as I sluiced away the mess I made a new resolution to behave in an orderly Christian fashion.

was generally agreed that Mildred had managed a déclassé

Is it just women who do that?" she asked. "I hate to generalize, but how often do men act that way? Surrendering to another person because they're supposedly so gifted. I'm sure it happens, but we seem to hear about women doing it more. Do you think we're biologically more ready to serve?

When couples cannot talk about their problems in a healthy way and become entrenched in their opinions, they have the same failed conversations over and over.  The relationship becomes emotionally clogged. Friction and frustration grow. Partners feel rejected, like they can't get through to one another.  Behaviors associated with conflict avoidance include passive aggressive behavior, withdrawal. 

Be pleasant, patient, and professional, please.

She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves.

In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

She de-realizes her behavior by this sense of tentativeness, reversibility, contingency, arbitrariness of everything she does—and since situations only become real to her after a long time (perhaps never fully so) she has the space—of incomplete commitment, so to speak—to behave destructively, unreliably, erratically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly.

The Cavaliere is no democrat. But his chilly heart is not insensitive to a certain idea of justice. Not for him the behavior of his grandfather, of whom it is told that he brained a serving boy while drunk in a tavern near London, and retired without realizing what he had done. The distraught taverner followed him to his room and said, "My lord, do you know that you killed that boy?" Stammered the Cavaliere's ancestor: "Put him on the bill." *

He doesn't speak of love. It's just something he does. Something he is. Love is the something he does while other folks sit around talking about it.

It's all to do with the way you carry yourself, the way you face the world.

The next day Mrs Honeyfoot told her husband that John Segundus was exactly what a gentleman should be, but she feared he would never profit by it for it was not the fashion to be modest and quiet and kind-hearted.

He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.

Mr. Lascelles whispered to Mr. Drawlight that he had not realized before that doing kind actions would lead to his being addressed in familiar terms by so many low people - it was most unpleasant - he would take care to do no more.

The precautions of nervous people re infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.

We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.

The forms of manners which should be scrupulously observed are, invariably, those which contribute to the comfort, or dignity of others.

One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.