Behavior Quotes

“Everything you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be.”
― Julien Smith, The Flinch

“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, What Happened to Lani Garver

“When everyone hates a person, you should investigate thoroughly, and when everyone loves a person, you should also investigate thoroughly.”
― Confucius, The Analects

“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Behavior is the substance of religion. Belief is the substance of relationship.”
― Charles F. Stanley, God's Way Day By Day: A Daily Devotional for Discovering God’s Life-Changing Wisdom

“Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Formal education and current position can define your worthiness. What makes you extraordinary is defined by your attitude towards others.”
― Ashish Patel

“Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.”
― Steven Pinker

“Your self-talk is the channel of behavior change”
― Gino Norris

“Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“I went to bed without reading, instead staring out my window with the curtains drawn, wondering about boys. Why did they behave so oddly? One minute their teasing was relentless, and then bam!― they’d stun you with a thoughtful gesture. Either way, their actions made you want to cry. Maybe that was the intent.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

“We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry

“One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.”
― Philip Zimbardo

“You can be in your room and lead people. Just develop your potentials and publicize them and you will see people looking for your product. That is influence; self-made leaders do not look for followers. Followers look for them.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Thus if we know a child has had sufficient opportunity to observe and acquire a behavioral sequence, and we know he is physically capable of performing the act but does not do so, then it is reasonable to assume that it is motivation which is lacking. The appropriate countermeasure then involves increasing the subjective value of the desired act relative to any competing response tendencies he might have, rather than having the model senselessly repeat an already redundant sequence of behavior.”
― Urie Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R.

“If you behave in a manner that poisons your relationship, don’t be surprised when it dies.”
― Steve Maraboli

“Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners.”
― Kristen Crockett, The Gift of Past Relationships

“Behavior precedes belief - that is, most people must engage in a behavior before they accept that it is beneficial; then they see the results, and then they believe that it is the right thing to do....implementation precedes buy-in; it does not follow it.”
― Douglas B. Reeves, Leading Change in Your School: How to Conquer Myths, Build Commitment, and Get Results

“Clever talk, ingratiating looks, fawning reverence: Tso-ch’iu Ming found that shameful, and so do I. Friendly while harboring resentment: Tso-ch’iu Ming found that shameful, too, and so do I.”
― Confucius, The Analects

“Religious beliefs...should never be an excuse to treat people badly.”
― Zach Wahls, My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family

“The porpoises and whale themselves, in their quests for entertainment, often created problems. One summer a fashion developed in the training tanks (I think Keiki started it) for leaning out over the tank wall and seeing how far you could balance without falling out. Several animals might be teetering on the tank edge at one time, and sometimes one or another did fall out. Nothing much happened to them, except maybe a cut or a scrape from the gravel around the tanks; but of course we had to run and pick them up and put them back in. Not a serious problem, if the animal that fell out was small, but if it was a 400-pound adult bottlenose, you had to find four strong people to get him back, and when it happened over and over again, the people got cross. We feared too, that some animal would fall out at night or when no one was around and dry out, overheat, and die. We yelled at the porpoises, and rushed over and pushed them back in when we saw them teetering, but that just seemed to add to the enjoyment of what I'm sure the porpoises thoguht of as a hilariously funny game. Fortunately they eventually tired of it by themselves.”
― Karen Pryor, Lads Before the Wind: Diary of a Dolphin Trainer

“We live in a society where mutual respect and appreciation should be considered one of the pillars of modern life.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“If I closely examine what is my ultimate aim, it turns out that I am not really striving to be good and to fulfil the demands of a Supreme Judgement, but rather very much the contrary: I strive to know the whole human and animal community, to recognize their basic predilections, desires, moral ideals, to reduce these to simple rules and as quickly as possible trim my behaviour to these rules in order that I may find favour in the whole world’s eyes; and, indeed (this is the inconsistency), so much favour that in the end I could openly perpetrate the iniquities within me without alienating the universal love in which I am held –the only sinner who won’t be roasted. To sum up, then, my sole concern is the human tribunal, which I wish to deceive, moreover, though without practising any actual deception.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“John Grandin thought of himself as modern and civilized. To some extent he understood the neuroses of his fellow men. Perhaps they could not help themselves. But being uninhibited—the giving in to wayward impulse—is anarchy and chaos. Civilization means control; where would he be if he should let happen what was impossible and abhorrent to even think of? To hell with being “modern,” “civilized,” or “sophisticated.” Actually there was no such thing, beyond a self-induced or superimposed state of mind, unsound and superficial. The “twentieth century mind” was a euphemism which such persons as the glittering Arne Eklund used as a veneer for willful behavior, an excuse for self-indulgence. Even modern man was born a primitive and would always be a primitive so long as he had a feeling heart in his breast.”
― Charles Jackson, The Fall of Valor

“Person's behavior reflects nothing but the mirror of an aura he/she brought up in. Never doubt their integrity because of their insecurities.”
― Surjeet Kumar

“Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life