Behavioral Patterns Quotes

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

Half of what creates psychopaths is genetic, but the other half is conditioning.

We become what we repeatedly do.

We build our character from the bricks of habit we pile up day by day.

Remember that your character is the sum total of your habits.

Sometimes, when I'm scolding the kids, I sound just like my mom. I'm like, 'How did Jonetta get in here?'

The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

You can never trust a human being to behave as you would have expected in a given circumstance

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference.

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Health is a function of three things. 1. Luck 2. Genetics and 3. Choices in your lifestyle.

I don't know how people act. I've never understood that.

It is not so much what we know that is important, as what we are and what we do.

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you'll have little in the future.

Excuses are the explanations we use for hanging on to behaviors we don't like about ourselves; they are self-defeating behaviors we don't know how to change. InExcuses Begone! I review 18 of the most common excuses people use, such as "I'm too busy, too old, too fat, too scared or it's going to take too long or be too difficult."

Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.

When you take the time to understand why your parents did the things they did, you stand a good chance of learning more about your own behavior.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

People don't change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less