Albert Bandura Quotes

It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at present, but they have not always been so in the past and we cannot be sure that they will not be so in the future.

If you can't control what you think, you will not be able to control what you do.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Control thought-forms are the basis of our deepest moral crisis.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

There are thoughts we must not think.

We cannot always control our thoughts, but we can control our words, and repetition impresses the subconscious, and we are then master of the situation.

The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts.

It's not what people do that matters, it's why they do it.

Are we controlled by our thoughts, or are we controlling our thoughts?

History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

We have to push aside what generally concerns us most in our thought life, namely, the content of our thoughts, and learn instead to make conscious use of the element of will in our thinking.

Racing thoughts was the biggest hurdle to consistent meditation for me. I could sit down, but then I was left with this interior world of thoughts.

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose.

All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.

Awareness isn't passive. It directly leads to action (or inaction).

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions.

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.