Behavior Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

He was a strange boy to be sure. There was always some ground of probability and likelihood mingled with his absurd behavior. That was the best of it.

Charles Dickens

What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That's a different thing.

There are ways to get worse publicity than Tom Wappel, the MP who wrote an 81–year–old, a veteran, legally blind and partially deaf, and told him, sneeringly, in effect to get lost– because the old man had not voted Liberal. [...] Here are some: You could nail a five–day–old kitten to the floor and use it as a doorstop. You could cut off the heat to an orphanage in winter, and insist the little ones dance for stale biscuits, and then not give them any. Or you could take a chainsaw to the last redwood that was also the home of the last eagle and have it fall on the last panda. Outside of these cringing options, however Mr. Tom Wappel has more or less cornered the market in the Olympics of obnoxious behavior.

The things that mankind has tested and found right make for harmony and progress — or peace; and the things it has found wrong hinder progress and make for discord. The right things lead to rational behavior — such as the substitution of reason for force — and so to freedom. The wrong things lead to brute force and slavery.
But the peace I describe is not passive. It must be won. Real peace comes from struggle that involves such things as effort, discipline, enthusiasm. This is also the way to strength. An inactive peace may lead to sensuality and flabbiness, which are discordant. It is often necessary to fight to lessen discord. This is the paradox.

Richard E. Byrd

Taking faith seriously leads to the utility of altruistic behavior.

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.

Simplicity has power. Founding our life on constructive, positive behavior is the simplest, most direct, and powerful approach I've ever found-simple, but not easy.

The percent likelihood of a society being physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent (48/49).

James W. Prescott

The armature of economic neo-liberalism... cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.

Arnold Davidson

He found insanity no excuse, however, for irrational behavior.

Brandon Sanderson

Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, sel denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.

Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.

In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior.

Everyone - you included - is on her best behavior in the beginning of a relationship. Sometimes little quirks turn out to be big ones, and the big advantage that women have - sometimes the only advantage - is their intuition.

Nicholas Sparks

The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.

Even if all the laws of psychology were known, one could make a prediction about the behavior of a man only if in addition to the laws, the special nature of the particular situation were known.

Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.

In our definition of system we noted that all systems have interrelationships between objects and between their attributes. If every part of the system is so related to every other part that any change in one aspect results in dynamic changes in all other parts of the total system, the system is said to behave as a whole or coherently. At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity.

Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.

Stephen Jay Gould

I immediately felt better about killing him. I've never known a Trevor who wasn't a total douchebag. It's just one of those names that goes so nicely with selfish, arrogant, malicious behavior—and really, what did I know about this guy? Nothing, except that his name was Trevor and he'd been nabbed in the midst of breaking-and-entering. That was plenty.

What does it mean to love someone with all your heart? It means to love with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. Surely when you love your wife with all your heart, you cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her, or abuse her by words, sullen behavior, or actions.

Ezra Taft Benson

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.... A lot of good fiction is sentimental.... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up.... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure — which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration — and maybe two who know how to give a terrific back-rub.

Spider Robinson

In other words, words can be empty and all that does is just reinforce the bad behavior of tyrants.