Quotes About Behavior

Your mental attitude is the most dependable key to your personality.

But remember that extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes.

When men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it.

deeds, and not words, are what count most'.

People are influenced in their actions, not by reason so much as by feelings. The creative faculty of the mind is set

Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

pleasing personality.

It has been well said that all men are 'the creatures of habit

People take on the nature and the habits and the power of thought of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony.

You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.

English "manners" were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he preferred to die than see Achilles sulking into inaction. Clearly, the epic poets understood invisible histories. Also later thinkers and poets had more elaborate methods for dealing with randomness, as we will see with stoicism.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). Psychologists give it a fancier name, but my friend Marty has no training in behavioral sciences.

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.

people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If

On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics.

This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But

The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say