Quotes About Human Behavior

“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.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Pain explains a great deal of human conduct, but the fear of pain even more.”
― Neil Abramson, Unsaid: A Novel

“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

“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

“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

“Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked “Cunning,” the next, “Impressionable.” They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-3

“سأحاول أن أحبك, لا لأنك جدير بهذا الحب ولكن لأنى جدير بأن أنّظف قلبى من كره الأخرين”
― Shadi Kamal Kandil

“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, 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

Thoughts On Humanity

Relations between the sexes are so complicated that the only way you can tell if members of the set are going together is if they are married. Then, almost certainly, they are not.

• –Cleveland Amory

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

• –William S. Burroughs

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

• –Willa Cather

Men and women are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

• –Isak Dinesen

All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others.

• –Mahatma Gandhi

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

• –Mahatma Gandhi

Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.

• –Vincent van Gogh

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

• –John Haldane

Men and women should live next door and visit each other once in a while.

• –Katharine Hepburn

The traveler’s-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

• –Aldous Huxley

Buy ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

• –I Peter

Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.

• –Guglielmo Marconi

There is a destiny that makes us brothers: None goes his way alone: All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.

• –Edwin Markham

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

• –Don Marquis

Each of us brings with him an element, more or less important, of the life of humanity to come.

• –Giuseppe Mazzini

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

• –Mary McCarthy

The only way in which one can make endurable man’s inhumanity to man, and man’s destruction of his own environment, is to exemplify in your own lives man’s humanity to man and man’s reverence for the place in which he lives.

• –Alan Paton

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.

• –Pope John Paul II

It’s great to be great, but it’s greater to be human.

• –Will Rogers

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

• –George Bernard Shaw

The desire for the well-being of one’s own nation can be-and must be-made compatible with the welfare of all humanity.

• –Louis L. Snyder

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.

• –Woodrow Wilson