behavior Quotes

“Let your need guide your behavior.”

“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

“The average man don’t like trouble and danger.”

“He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.”

“All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.”

“You ought never to “sass” old people—unless they “sass” you first.”

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

“That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly.”

“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”

“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.”

“You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.”

“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likeable.”

“What struck me – with her and with many other female American friends I have – is how invested they are in being ‘liked’. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and that this ‘likeable’ trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly.”

“[Benjamin Franklin]identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate--temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility--and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.”

I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.

“She’s kind of like a baby. She didn’t know she was supposed to grow up, and that makes her more fun than other grown-up people.”

“Things happen to people by accident … A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know … how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.

“If they strain me up tight, why, let ‘em look out! I can’t bear it, and I won’t.”

“If we could act a little more according to common sense, and a good deal less according to fashion, we should find many things work easier.”

“We shall all have to be judged according to our works, whether they be towards man or towards beast.”

“My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I’m quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

“Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.”

“If you’re always on time, it implies that you never have anything better you should be doing.”

“Let’s enjoy the beautiful things we can see, my dear, and not think about those we cannot.”

“Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.”

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

We don’t have to be embarrassed if someone we love chooses to behave inappropriately.

Each person is responsible for his or her behavior.

“He’s so well brought up. I can tell just by looking at how he behaves during dinner. Such lovely manners, and he always offers me the best part of the meat, like the fish cheek or the juiciest piece of duck.”

″As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.″

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

“A toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with himself. Toxic shame — the shame that binds us — is the basis for both neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behavior.”

“Neurotic shame is the root and fuel of all compulsive/addictive behaviors.”

“Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying ‘like’ all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster.”

“Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.”

“It’s impossible to undo fifteen or twenty years of learned behavior with a mother in only a few months. If it takes nine months to bring a life into this world, what makes us think we can let go of someone in less?”

“If I could tell my colleagues in the media four things, they would be: 1.Everyone hates you. 2.No one is afraid of you. 3.No one believes what you say. 4.Nobody owes you anything. If every journalist in America realized those four things, their behavior would transform overnight, immeasurably for the better.”

“Kinds of behavior that work in a specialized environment, such as a prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.”

“Would you say you behave differently when you know you’re being watched?”

“Age is just a number, not a state of mind or a reason for any type of particular behaviour.”

“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behaves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”

“The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around.”

“Gottman, it turns out, can teach us a great deal about the critical part of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing. Thin slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”

“Well, you really are your own worst critic. I’m sure it’s amazing. I remember that paper that you wrote in school about synaptic behavioral routines. It made me cry.”

“Love can be a tremendous deterrent to destructive behavior; it gives the individual the support she needs to change her life.”

“But eventually you will find you return to your original behavior and attitudes. This is because your life is determined, insofar as it is a law of nature for you, to take the path of least resistance.”

“To get along with God, consider the consequences of your behavior”

“Suddenly, a new image had risen up before me, a lofty and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as fervent within me as the craving to worship and admire. I gave her the name Beatrice….”

“A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all”

“Actually, I am a failed anorexic. I have anorexic thinking, but I can’t seem to muster the behavior”

“Realize that your child’s unusual behaviors are not your fault and not your child’s fault. Highly sensitive children are not being difficult on purpose.”

“There is always a good fit when parents accept their children for who they are. (...) A good fit is a family and school environment that supports and encourages a child’s natural way of behaving.”

“Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.”

“Well behaved women seldom make history.”

“Perhaps I am pretentious in saying so, but I would like to think that I am not “many men,” and that I dinna necessarily place my behavior at the lowest common denominator.”

“We have then a public execution and a timetable. They do not punish the same type of crimes or the same type of delinquent. But they each define a certain penal style.”

Raven does come across as the typical bad boy at the beginning, but there is definitely a lot more to his character when you see how he behaves around his brothers and his family in general.

″‘Well, dear me, I never thought we would have a penguin for a pet,’ said Mrs. Popper. ‘Still, he behaves pretty well, on the whole, and he is so nice and clean that perhaps he will be a good example to you and the children.‘”

“In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior...”

“This is important because our behavior is affected by our assumptions or our perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know.”

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

“What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”

“But weeping with them and rejoicing with them does not mean trying to take control of their out-of-control choices and behaviors. We can forgive them. But we cannot control them. And we should not enable them.”

“Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.”

“In dog obedience school we learned that if you want an undesirable behavior to go away, you stop paying attention to it.”

“When we don’t know someone, or can’t communicate with them, or don’t have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.”

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.”

“Low trust causes friction, whether it is caused by unethical behavior or by ethical but incompetent behavior (because even good intentions can never take the place of bad judgment). Low trust is the greatest cost in life and in organizations, including families. Low trust creates hidden agendas, politics, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, win-lose thinking, defensive and protective communication—all of which reduce the speed of trust. Low trust slows everything—every decision, every communication, and every relationship.”

“It was hard not to think that wherever he wound up, it was not going to be good. He drank. He drugged. He regarded life with devilish disdain. I could never see him turning it around. Which is why I have also learned that the worst predictor of future behavior is high school behavior.”

“A person has integrity when there is no gap between intent and behavior…when he or she is whole, seamless, the same—inside and out. I call this “congruence.” And it is congruence—not compliance—that will ultimately create credibility and trust.”

“we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior. This is why, as we’ll discuss later, one of the fastest ways to restore trust is to make and keep commitments—even very small commitments—to ourselves and to others.”

“Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.”

“How would I behave in a situation that caused me to summon the essence of my character? The tragedy inspired me to test myself. I wanted to reveal to myself who I was: the kind of person who died, or the kind of person who overcame circumstances to help himself and others”

“Like toddlers, toxic people base all their decisions on what they feel rather than on what is right. The thought of any consequences of their actions pale in comparison to getting what they want in the moment. Contrast this with healthy people: they think before they act and are mindful of how what they do may negatively impact themselves or others. Toxic people cannot tolerate consideration of others. When trying to have a conversation with them, they are self-referential rather than self-reflective. When you share something about yourself with such people, they immediately turn the account into a story about them. The self-referential side of toxicity turns toxic people into the greatest one-uppers, name-droppers, and liars you’ll ever come across. You cannot have a mutually beneficial conversation, where there is a natural back-and-forth flow. Sharing does not exist when communicating with toxic people. Of course, healthy flawed people sometimes do some of the same things that toxic people do. The difference, however, between ordinary and toxic lies is in the subtleness, persistence, and consistency of a toxic person’s behaviors.”

“I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.”

“Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior.”

“When there is wind on the moon, you must be very careful how you behave. Because if it is an ill-wind, and you behave badly, it will blow straight into your heart, and then you will behave badly for a long time to come.”

“Stellaluna behaved as a good bird should.”

Drinking is such a beastly thing, anyhow.

“I guess it doesn’t matter what a person’s name is as long as he behaves himself,” said Marilla, feeling herself called upon to inculcate a good and useful moral.

“What shall we do with that girl? She never will behave like a young lady.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

“To be sure, considering the exhibition you performed in his presence this afternoon, I might say it would be wise to refuse him: since he asked you after that, he must either be hopelessly stupid or a venturesome fool.”

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as I did,—repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.

He did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that he was the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his discovery.

Vronsky’s life was particularly happy in that he had a code of principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and what he ought not to do. This code of principles covered only a very small circle of contingencies, but then the principles were never doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that circle, had never had a moment’s hesitation about doing what he ought to do. These principles laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.

“Take him away. He dances like Mao the Peacock. He will crush our young,”