61 Quotes On Human Behavior

Human behavior is a complex and fascinating subject, weaving together elements of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It shapes our relationships, influences our decisions, and ultimately defines our societies. With such a profound impact on our daily lives, it's no surprise that countless thinkers, writers, and philosophers have sought to capture the essence of human behavior through the ages. In this blog post, we've curated a collection of 61 insightful quotes that delve into the various facets of human behavior. Whether you're looking for inspiration, reflection, or a deeper understanding of the human condition, these quotes are sure to resonate and provoke thought.

1. “It is a sin to believe evil of others but it is seldom a mistake.” - Garrison Keillor

2. “Handsome is as handsome does” - J.R.R. Tolkien

3. “We considered behaving, but it's against our nature.” - O.R. Melling

4. “All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.” - Thomas Pynchon

5. “Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did.” - Paulo Coelho

6. “Sometimes people will hear you and be able to change their behavior, but often their behavior has more to do with their own need for approval than with your need for support. No matter what their response, you need to be firm and hold your ground. At the end of the day, your health is your responsibility.” - Jillian Michaels

7. “Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.” - Malcolm Gladwell

8. “The study of doctrine and the teaching of doctrine will change behavior more than the study of behavior will change behavior.” - Boyd K. Packer

9. “The porpoises and whale themselves, in their quests for entertainment, often created problems. One summer a fashion developed in the training tanks (I think Keiki started it) for leaning out over the tank wall and seeing how far you could balance without falling out. Several animals might be teetering on the tank edge at one time, and sometimes one or another did fall out. Nothing much happened to them, except maybe a cut or a scrape from the gravel around the tanks; but of course we had to run and pick them up and put them back in. Not a serious problem, if the animal that fell out was small, but if it was a 400-pound adult bottlenose, you had to find four strong people to get him back, and when it happened over and over again, the people got cross. We feared too, that some animal would fall out at night or when no one was around and dry out, overheat, and die. We yelled at the porpoises, and rushed over and pushed them back in when we saw them teetering, but that just seemed to add to the enjoyment of what I'm sure the porpoises thoguht of as a hilariously funny game. Fortunately they eventually tired of it by themselves.” - Karen Pryor

10. “Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.” - Anna Godbersen

11. “Evidentemente, muitos destes cegos estao a ser pisados, empurrados, esmurrados, é o efeito do pânico, um efeito natural, pode-se dizer, a natureza animal é mesmo assim, também a vegetal se comportaria de igual maneira se nao tivesse todas aquelas raízes a prendê-la no chão, e que bonito seria poder ver árvores do bosque a fugir ao incêndio.” - Saramago, José

12. “Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.” - Derrick Jensen

13. “This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

14. “I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower” - Jacqueline Carey

15. “We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.” - Robinson Jeffers

16. “The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.” - P.J. O'Rourke

17. “But why must the system go to such lengths to block our empathy? Why all the psychological acrobatics? The answer is simple: because we care about animals, and we don't want them to suffer. And because we eat them. Our values and behaviors are incongruent, and this incongruence causes us a certain degree of moral discomfort. In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat, so that we feel comfortable enough to consume them. And the system that constructs our schema of meat equips us with the means by which to do this.” - Melanie Joy

18. “The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.” - Hal Herzog

19. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.” - Philip K. Dick

20. “Thus if we know a child has had sufficient opportunity to observe and acquire a behavioral sequence, and we know he is physically capable of performing the act but does not do so, then it is reasonable to assume that it is motivation which is lacking. The appropriate countermeasure then involves increasing the subjective value of the desired act relative to any competing response tendencies he might have, rather than having the model senselessly repeat an already redundant sequence of behavior.” - Urie Bronfenbrenner

21. “When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.” - C.S. Lewis

22. “Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.” - Philip Zimbardo

23. “Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.” - Philip Zimbardo

24. “Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.” - Philip Zimbardo

25. “I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” - Philip Zimbardo

26. “Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.” - Philip Zimbardo

27. “The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.” - Philip Zimbardo

28. “Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.” - Philip Zimbardo

29. “If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.” - Philip G. Zimbardo

30. “It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted to “socialize” at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.” - J.D. Stroube

31. “So I've started wearing sweatpants to bed because I really don't need Santa seeing me in my underwear.” - Jeff Kinney

32. “They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

33. “The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.” - Alan Hollinghurst

34. “Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners.” - Kristen Crockett

35. “The world is my church. My actions are my prayer. My behavior is my creed.” - Steve Maraboli

36. “Everything you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be.” - Julien Smith

37. “The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways–and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.” - Paulo Coelho

38. “Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.” - Oscar Wilde

39. “Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological” - Arthur C. Clarke

40. “Your self-talk is the channel of behavior change” - Gino Norris

41. “Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?” - Bret Easton Ellis

42. “You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.” - Catherynne M. Valente

43. “Behavior precedes belief - that is, most people must engage in a behavior before they accept that it is beneficial; then they see the results, and then they believe that it is the right thing to do....implementation precedes buy-in; it does not follow it.” - Douglas B. Reeves

44. “I've always been a poor sport and a sore loser...any other behavior might encourage a repeat performance” - Josh Stern

45. “Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women."[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996]” - Nora Ephron

46. “The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe.” - Valerie Tarico

47. “In the end, those who demean others only disrespect themselves.” - D.B. Harrop

48. “Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.” - Christian Baloga

49. “Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.” - Marcus Aurelius

50. “The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.” - Lara Santoro

51. “Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust?” - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

52. “Let me explain before another word is written: I have never once asked a cat, "So tell me what's up, Charlie?" and Charlie says, "Jeez Jackson, thanks for asking. A little annoyed by the fluorescent lights, and will you please check out this tiny piece-of-junk pan I have to crap in but, hey, I still got my legs, you know? Can't complain, pal.” - Jackson Galaxy

53. “You may not like what I see but I don't like what you do.” - Donna Lynn Hope

54. “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.” - Cesare Pavese

55. “Stupidity is not a behavior; it's a religion. One can die for it!” - Raheel Farooq

56. “God knows we all have to at least try to justify our behavior so we don't feel too guilty about it later.” - Taylor Nadeau

57. “Be mindful of your social environment. By nature, the group you hang-out with will develop a common behavior and mindset. This behavior usually gravitates towards the lowest common denominator. Choose your group wisely.” - Steve Maraboli

58. “If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in poor company.” - Bryant McGill

59. “As believers, everything we do is based on how we view God.” - Hayley DiMarco

60. “You can speak with spiritual eloquence, pray in public, and maintain a holy appearance... but it is your behavior that will reveal your true character.” - Steve Maraboli

61. “I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. Italways made me want to do just the opposite.” - Jean-Paul Sartre