Erving Goffman Quotes

People treat us the way we teach them to treat us.

Umm... I don't judge my relationship with Puff or Bad Boy according to other people or past artists. At the end of the day, you are in charge of your career, and you can't depend on no man to do anything for you. I've learned to judge relationships with a person on myself and that person, not what they have done with previous people.

I had always liked blind dates. If nothing else, it was an interesting way of discovering what people thought of you.

The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about himself, and then gradually lead the conversation around yourself—and keep it there.

Whatever kind of introvert you are, some people will find you 'too much' in some ways and 'not enough' in others.

To make one person the center of your world is bound to end in disaster. There are too many factors outside your control.

... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.

Henceforward, I shout to the heavens, I shall deliver no more lectures on behalf of good causes: I am the good cause that denies the need for such lectures. Avaunt, importuning world! Back to my cell.

The way you get to know yourself is by the expression on other people's faces.

It's this weird thing that I always feel like I have to gauge in myself, like, "Don't come on too strong because you won't get your way."

Every relationship in your organization will affect you one way or another. Those who do not increase you will inevitably decrease you.

What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. Your answers lie inside of you.

Destiny planned out, I don't need no hand out.

Every man must some time or other be trusted to himself.

No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.

When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

I've got more than enough for my needs [for social life in Moscow], let's put it that way.

Fairness means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself.

It doesn't do any good to hold the door open for someone if they don't have a way to walk through it. And if they do have a way to pass through it then you probably don't need to hold it open because they can open it for themselves.

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.

The best way to win is to not need to.

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.

It may be that them whose pleasure brings you into this world owes you a living, but it don't mean the world is responsible.