Quotes About Behavior

What people would like is that a coward or a hero be born that way.

Thus arises the solution proposed by the so-called Gestalt psychology: behaviour involves a total field embracing subject and objects, and the dynamics of this field constitutes feeling (Lewin), while its structure depends on perception, effector-functions, and intelligence.

she had ignored the Heidlers because she realized that she could afford to display coldness, and that no good ever comes from being too polite.

The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

I said, If we were good always would we be happy always? No, said Grandmother. Then I shall be bad.

Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.

Our habits and our fears make our choices. We are an algorithm of ourselves-- if you liked that you may also like this.

If you're a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the time, and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy the company of other men, although attractive women are part of their reward.

Passion is not well bred.

Even being good has unintended consequences. You're only human, after all.

I watched him, sardonic, cynical. A great poet, truly, yet unkind. The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.

So long as one remains in the same condition, the inclinations which result from habit and are the least natural to us can be kept; but as soon as the situation changes, habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only habit. Now are there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? Where does this difference come from? If the name nature were limited to habits conformable to nature, we would spare ourselves this garble!

How could I become wicked, when I had nothing but examples of gentleness before my eyes, and none around me but the best people in the world?

IN order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed.

Hard to rouse and hard to restrain: that had been a constant trait in my character.

Your beginning, he said to me, is the rule of what will be required of you: seek to behave so as to do more afterwards, but watch out never to do less.

No sabía emplear con ellos más que tres medios inútiles siempre y frecuentemente perniciosos con los niños: el sentimiento, los razonamientos y el enojo.

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives.

La vertu ne nous coûte que par notre faute, et si nous voulions être toujours sages, rarement aurions-nous besoin d'être vertueux.

If you want to be treated like a mother," I said, "you should act like one.

Fussing over children who cry only encourages them. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.