Behavior Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological

Arthur C. Clarke

When you have divided government, the administration knows that both the Congress and the media are watching it, which restrains its behavior. But we're in the process of creating an environment where everyone knows that accountability is a joke.

Human beings hold two types of theories of action. There is the one that they espouse, which is usually expressed in the form of stated beliefs and values. Then there is the theory that they actually use; this can only be inferred from observing their actions, that is, their actual behavior.

In object-oriented analysis, we seek to model the world by identifying the classes and objects that form the vocabulary of the problem domain, and in object-oriented design, we invent the abstractions and mechanisms that provide the behavior that this model requires.

Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply: happen: to people, rather than be being caused by their own choices and behavior. Thus there is said to be an 'epidemic' of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people catch just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

Guy Gavriel Kay

The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

I am convinced now that virtually every destructive behavior and addiction I battled off and on for years was rooted in my (well-earned) insecurity.

Law is an order of human behavior. An order is a system of rules. Law is not, as it is sometimes said, a rule. It is a set of rules having the kind of unity we understand by a system. It is impossible to grasp the nature of law if we limit our attention to the single isolated rule.

Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

Two possible approaches to the organization of general systems theory suggest themselves, which are to be thought of as complementary rather than competitive, or at least as two roads each of which is worth exploring. The first approach is to look over the empirical universe and to pick out certain general phenomena which are found in many different disciplines, and to seek to build up general theoretical models relevant to these phenomena. The second approach is to arrange the empirical fields in a hierarchy of complexity of organization of their basic "individual" or unit of behavior, and to try to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each.

Kenneth Boulding

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.

To self-regulate, learning systems must be able to
1. Sense, monitor and scan significant aspects of their environment,
2. Relate this information to the operating norms that guide system behavior
3. Detect significant deviations from these norms, and
4. Initiate corrective action when discrepancies are detected.
If these four conditions are satisfied, a continuous process of information exchange is created between a system and its environment, allowing the system to monitor changes and initiate appropriate responses. In this way, the system can operate in an intelligent, self-regulating manner

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.... Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior... we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, field or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity.

When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it.

There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. [...] That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behavior that is mindful of obligations.

Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings.

I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.

Physics does not endeavour to explain nature. In fact, the great success of physics is due to a restriction of its objectives: it only endeavours to explain the regularities in the behavior of objects.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

John Dos Passos

Atheism may be, in some cases, just verbal behavior masking personal feelings that may be very different, perhaps even deeply religious.

[In] the definition of international system... There is some "form of control" that regulates behavior and may range from informal rules of the system to formal institutions.... A view prevalent among many scholars of political science is that the essence of international relations is precisely the absence of control... a condition of anarchy...

When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.

Russell L. Ackoff

As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity.

Anthony Robbins