Human Behavior Quotes

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday”
― Don Marquis

“... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.”
― L.S. Vygotsky

“Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.”
― Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro

“To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.”
― Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

“The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“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

“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 Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“That was when I first observed a phenomenon I now call the "New York Slide": you offer your words to try to communicate and connect with someone, but your words just hit a brick wall the person has erected to ward off human contact- the words slide down it and roll away.”
― Kelly Cutrone, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You

“General benevolence, but not general friendship, make a man what he ought to be.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“No one really knows why humans do what they do.”
― David K. Reynolds

“What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.”
― William Dietrich, Napoleon's Pyramids

“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, Overkill

“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.”
― Michael Crichton

“For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“When we do cross paths with people whose beliefs and attitudes conflict with our own, we are rarely challenged.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“People who discriminate doesn't understand that they are a stranger to others.”
― Jestoni Revealed

“Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“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, The Undead Kama Sutra

“It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work - every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career - is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few could argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.”
― Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage