Kurt Lewin Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

The outlook of a Bruno, a Kepler, or a Galileo is determined by the idea of a comprehensive, all-embracing unity of the physical world. The same law governs the courses of the stars, the falling of stones, and the flight of birds. This homogenization of the physical world with respect to the validity of law deprives the division of physical objects into rigid abstractly defined classes of the critical significance it had for Aristotelian physics, in which membership in a certain conceptual class was considered to determine the physical nature of an object.

Kurt Lewin
Lewin formally defines a Gestalt as:
a system whose parts are dynamically connected in such a way that a change of one part results in a change of all other parts.

Kurt Lewin
The objective of social change might concern the nutritional standard of consumption, the economic standard of living, the type of group relation, the output of a factory, the productivity of an educational team. It is important that a social standard to be changed does not have the nature of a thing but of a process..

Kurt Lewin
The second experiment, with four leaders, makes possible a comparison of the authoritarianism and democracy of four different leaders, and the "laissez-faire" method of two different leaders. In two cases it is also possible to compare the same atmosphere, created by two different leaders with the same club. One other type of control seemed very important, the nature of the club activity, and the physical setting...

Kurt Lewin
For any type of social management, It is of great practical importance that levels of quasi-stationary equilibria can be changed in either of two ways: by adding forces in the desired direction, or by diminishing opposing forces.

Kurt Lewin
Theoretical psychology in its present state must try to develop a system of concepts which shows all the characteristics of a Gestalt, in which any part depends upon every other part. As we do not yet have the knowledge of facts which really suffices to determine this system of concepts and as, on the other hand, this knowledge of "facts" cannot be acquired without developing this system of concepts, there seems to be only one way open: to proceed slowly by tentative steps, to make decisions rather reluctantly, to keep in view always the whole field of psychology, and to stay in closest contact with the actual work of psychological research.

Kurt Lewin
A goal can play an essential role in the psychological situation without being clearly present in consciousness.

Kurt Lewin
[Lewin defined conflict] as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.

Kurt Lewin
The essential meaning of such an assertion is this: events a and b are necessarily dependent moments of a single unified occurrence. The mathematical formula states the quantitative relations involved in the occurrence. Already in such cases the dependent moment of the occurrence are moments that obtain temporally by side.

Kurt Lewin