Lev Vygotsky Quotes

We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.

What motivates most people to change their behavior is consequences. No consequences? No behavior modification.

You only have control over three things in your life - the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior). How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don't like what you are producing and experiencing, you have to change your responses.

Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.

Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him.

The environment shapes people's actions.

The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.

When you try to bring about behavioral change by an effort of will, you actually do violence to yourself, and the chances are very good that you will not succeed. This is so universally true that you can actually make money from it.

I do not feel called upon to try to reform any person over 25 years of age because by that time the habit has been formed. Then it is only a question of the strength of will or mind of the smoker which will enable him to stop. He knows the injurious effects and controls his own destiny.

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober

I do not know how anyone can mould anyone.

Whoever would change men must change the conditions of their lives.

Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that's not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.

I cannot change others, but I can influence others... we can't change people, but we can and we do influence people, and we do it every single day.

It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

The secret is not in what you do to yourself but rather in what you don't do.

Discipline is not punishment. Discipline is changing someone’s behavior.

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

A person is either the effect of his environment or is able to have an effect upon his environment.

Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment.

Discipline is training that corrects and perfects our mental faculties or molds our moral character. Discipline is control gained by enforced obedience. It is the deliberate cultivation of inner order.

You decide for yourself when it will hurt.

We make our buildings, and then our buildings make and shape us.