Human Behavior Quotes

How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship ~ Timothy Keller

In times of stress and danger such as come about as the result of an epidemic, many tragic and cruel phases of human nature are brought out, as well as many brave and unselfish ones. ~ William Crawford Gorgas

Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature. ~ Dennis Stock

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term. ~ Matt Ridley

I don't find the same things funny that many other people seem to find funny. I don't really respond to sex jokes and things like that. Some of my friends look at me and go, "Come on, Nic, that was my best joke. Why aren't you laughing?" I go, "I really don't know why I'm not laughing. I'm sort of out of sync with it." So I'd have to find something that was really about weird human behavior for me to laugh. ~ Nicolas Cage

On the question of whether a behavioral science can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established. ~ Anatol Rapoport

Plants do not grow all by themselves; they are pulled by the sunlight, the soil and all of the other factors required for their development. A sailboat does not sail; the wind moves the sail. All things are influenced by something else, as all people are acted upon by other things. Our behavior is generated by the many interacting variables that we encounter; there is no one thing that influences human behavior. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

When we do it, it is for art. When they [animals] do it, it is for competition. Both may be true. What is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior in spiritual terms of a sense of beauty, and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating fitness. The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher and unique. ~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It's not "integrity," it's "always do the right thing." It's not "innovation," it's "look at the problem from a different angle." Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders - in that order.

Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you - not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

You don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.

Simon Sinek

Human behavior, ninety-eight percent of it, is an abomination. ~ Thom Jones

Human behavior cannot be explained for the simple reason that it makes no sense. ~ Marty Rubin

This script was just so much smarter than usual and I'm just fascinated by human behavior. ~ Angelina Jolie

None of great sages of China preached the precept of love as a guideline for human behavior ... ~ James Thayer

I still can't wrap my mind around crossing that line of human behavior – civilized people punching and fighting, making violence their communication of choice.

Is it because I'm a woman, I've never considered hitting someone who acted inappropriately? Even one of my best male friends, a gentle man, a believer in spirit and mankind, has thrown a few punches in his time.

As a writer, my weapons are words. The thought of hurting someone physically to prove my point has never and will never be an option for me. Well, let me amend that: if someone hurt my child in front of me, tiger-mother's claws would come out. ~ Rachel Thompson

Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. ~ Deepak Chopra

Why do you think news of violence and aggression receive huge ratings! It's because the human mind is conditioned to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones, because even if you ignore a positive event, it's very unlikely that something bad will happen to you because of your ignorance, but if you are inattentive to a negative event, you may just lose your life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Nothing can be perfect... even the analysis of the human behavior. - If you think they can be perfect and 100% Accurate... ~ Deyth Banger

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. ~ Carl Sagan

Blaming others wouldn't do. Only when I began to see the world's ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior. ~ Kathleen Norris

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals? ~ Douglas Coupland

I've always been someone who really watches other people, human behavior. To watch it and be able to express it through your version has always been really exciting to me. ~ Christina Hendricks

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived. ~ John Boorman

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe ~ Thomas Gilovich

Rafael?"
"Yeah?"
„Do we all have monsters?"
„Yes."
„Why does God give us so many monsters?"
„You want to know my theory?"
„Sure."
„I think it's other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn't have anything to do with it. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occuring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it. ~ Nir Eyal

Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200,000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things. ~ Andrew Weil

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

Her Mother and Father were especially blind to feelings. Her Father denied he even had feelings and her Mother assumed everyone shared hers. Heather didn't know for years that her ability to see people's feelings and even feel them sometimes was unusual and when she discovered that the cruelty and rudeness that adults and friends inflicted on each other was unintentional or at least uninformed, she decided to withdraw, overwhelmed by the pain of typical human behavior. ~ Matthew Weiner

Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time. ~ Francis Fukuyama

Sin, blasphemy, heresy – all these are primitive ideas created by primitive creatures, unworthy of the title "human". ~ Abhijit Naskar

Own your biases, don't be owned by them. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise.
The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation.
The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least. ~ Joel Furches

I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought! ~ B.F. Skinner

A lot of the demonstrations that I do, when I get inside people's minds, is understanding human behavior and understanding how people think and getting their patterns down so I know how to create the illusion that I get inside their brain. ~ Criss Angel

Okay ... ' I hurried on. 'But why me?'
'You're a girl,' Lockwood called. 'Aren't you supposed to be more sensitive?'
'To emotions, yes. To nuances of human behavior. Not necessarily to secret passages in a wall.'
'Oh, it's much the same thing. ~ Jonathan Stroud

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus.
The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."
Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perce ~ Alexander Lowen

The science of epigenetics has also made it clear that there are two mechanisms by which organisms pass on hereditary information. Those two mechanisms provide a way for scientists to study both the contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) in human behavior. If you only focus on the blueprints, as scientists have been doing for decades, the influence of the environment is impossible to fathom. (Dennis 2003; Chakravarti and Little 2003) ~ Bruce H. Lipton

The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behaviorlacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates. ~ Frank Herbert

In short, Strict Father morality requires perfect, precise, literal communication, together with a form of behaviorism. Thus, Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met: 1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category. 2. Literality: All moral rules must be literal. 3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate. 4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punishments. Cognitive ~ George Lakoff

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation. ~ Audre Lorde

The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety. ~ Rose George

As for me, I preferred to let people believe what they wanted to believe. It made life far more interesting. But my fascination with human behavior was one I kept to myself, ~ Laurelin Paige

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities, ... art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and ... art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable. ~ Meredith Monk

Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human. ~ Carrie Latet

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. ~ Gary Wolf

But I couldn't quite believe that sex was the motivating force behind all human behavior, and that I was left out of the great cultural conversation because I had not been initiated into the mystery. ~ Carlene Bauer

We all are actors. The moment we step out of our comfort zones, the moment we are interacting with another, the actor in us comes alive. ~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

It is important you understand how fear affects you and how it drives human behavior so you can start to see situations and people accurately and respond more appropriately. When someone is behaving badly, attacking you, or being defensive, critical, or judgmental, it is not really about you. Fear is the real reason people behave badly. Their fears make them selfish, defensive, mean, and grouchy. Every time someone is behaving badly, step back and ask yourself, "What is this person afraid of? What fear inside me is driving my reaction to their attack? What am I afraid of?"
When you can accurately see the fear behind their behavior, and yours, you will see the situation for what it really is. ~ Kimberly Giles

The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility. ~ Lesslie Newbigin

If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered,then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millenia, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how ful your life has been and how richly you are blessed. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Robert Cialdini, author of one of my favorite books, Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion, writes: "A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they ~ Lior Suchard

You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick. ~ Carroll Bryant

Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature. ~ American Psychological Association

We can't just have mainstream behavior on television in a free society, we have to make sure we see the whole panorama of human behavior. ~ Jerry Springer

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Human behavior isn't necessarily logical, nor does it necessarily conform to our expectations. What each of us thinks of as logical is a reflection of our own beliefs, and of our own moral compass. ~ Philip Houston

How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data. ~ Thomas Gilovich

I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence. ~ Liz Garbus

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed. ~ Amy Waldman

In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can't buy love with gifts or favors, you can't hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can't be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider. ~ B.F. Skinner

The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in. ~ Peter Turchi

A person's self-concept is the core of his personality. ~ Joyce Brothers

The basis of all good human behavior is kindness. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

We need to reevaluate and reconsider what is appropriate human behavior. Human beings have been so successful at surviving because of our intelligence and cooperation. When we are unintelligent and uncooperative it is no wonder that our survival is threatened. We need to be educated about our health and the health of our planet, and work together to achieve goals that are impossible to achieve individually. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war? ~ Rose Macaulay

Hospitality is a word used to describe a human behavior that has the potential to bring about real-understanding among people who do not share a common faith or culture. ~ Martin E. Marty

Sometimes you control your demons and sometimes it controls you. ~ J. Limbu

One of our most important defenses against satanic influence will be learning how to behave out of what we know is truth rather than what we feel. Satan's desire is to modify human behavior to accomplish his unholy purposes. ~ Beth Moore

Design thinking enables business people to avoid mistakes of formulating ideas that, in the future, the customers may not be interested, hence putting the business at risk of experiencing losses. Thus, it applies tools from the world of design and shifting the focus to human behavior. ~ Hibatullah Jawhar

It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Under the tenets of behavioral finance, markets are not always efficient. It is human behavior that moves markets and not the universal information shared by market participants. ~ Gary Antonacci

People don't like us, my dear. The idea that someone who can play with their emotions, who can "mystically" get them to do certain things, makes them uncomfortable. What they do not realize - and what you must realize - is that manipulating is at the core of our social interaction. (...) Think about it. What is a man doing when he seeks the affection of a young lady? Why, he is trying to manipulate her to regard him favorably. What happens when two old friends sit down for a drink? They tell stories, trying to impress each other. Life as a human being is about posturing and influence. This isn't a bad thing, in fact, we depend upon it. These interactions teach us how to respond to others. ~ Brandon Sanderson

General benevolence, but not general friendship, make a man what he ought to be. ~ Jane Austen

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting. ~ Claire Danes

You love somebody. Do you? What is love? You think you have everything, but you don't have anything. You have to have hope and spirit. Be an optimist. But can you handle all your human behavior or other's behavior? You don't want to be good, but great. - Director's Note, The Room (2001), by Tommy P. Wiseau ~ Greg Sestero

Human behavior is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable. ~ Patrick White

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics. ~ David E. Kelley

I'm an expert in homo sapiens behavior. They can rationalize anything. Take war. They'll bankrupt their economies, sacrifie the best of their young, unleash a bloodbath that impresses even me, at the expense of providing shelter, food, and medicine for their own people. Compared to that, the sale of a few women is trivial. ~ Mario Acevedo

Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power. ~ John Henrik Clarke

When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman. ~ Abhijit Naskar

No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns. ~ Jacque Fresco

What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought. ~ Hal Herzog

One of the more fascinating things about human behavior is the degree to which we conceive of countless boundaries that constrain and inhibit us in extraordinary ways, even though they are nothing but mental constructs that, in reality, do not exist. ~ Dee Hock

Great horror stories of books and movies have seemingly come from some aspect of real-life events, and human behavior. This is evident as far back as Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho. The movie was based on a serial killer named, Ed Gein in Wisconsin. ~ Chris Mentillo

I believe the most useful knowledge about human behavior is based on people's lived experiences. ~ Brene Brown

Mr. Spock : 'I began to study human behavior from an alien perspective, thinking, humans are interesting, sad, foolish, but worthy of study. ~ Leonard Nimoy

Goodness is a special kind of truth and beauty. It is truth and beauty in human behavior. ~ Harry Allen Overstreet

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer's dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer's campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing "green wire goggles." No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood. ~ Evan S. Connell

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it? ~ Robert Buettner

Humans, I finally decided after a few more minutes of watching him, are paradoxically capable of both unattainable depths of kindness and unimaginable depths of cruelty, sometimes within the same body ... ~ Kiley MacLeod

Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet. ~ Mary Gaitskill

The study of religion is chiefly the study of a certain kind of human behavior, be it under the rubric of anthropology, sociology, or psychology. The study of theology, on the other hand, is the study of God. Religion is anthropocentric, theology is theocentric, the difference between religion and theology is ultimately the difference between God and man-hardly a small difference. ~ R.C. Sproul

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. ~ Sam Harris

The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can't control what grows in it, but we don't have to watch either. ~ Tiffany Madison

All good storytellers study psychology ... Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them. ~ Katharine McGee

The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior. ~ Dennis Prager

I guarantee if you walk into 100 spider webs, you will have changed your fundamental human behavior. And you can apply this to anything, And figure out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear. ~ Chris Hadfield

A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior. ~ Albert Bandura