Kurt Lewin Quotes

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

The way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel determines how you act.

In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporarily and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.

Sometimes you can have a reputation for not being relatable and nice because you had a bad day once.

Understanding human nature. Perception. That's how I see acting - perception and communication.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

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

Our motives and thoughts ultimately influence our actions.

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

How you think determines how you act. How you act in turn determines how others react to you.

When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

Guys behave like they're naive, but they're not stupid. They know what's going on.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

The kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you.

You can change only what people know, not what they do.

Social cognitive theory rejects the dichotomous conception of self as agent and self as object. Acting on the environment and acting on oneself entail shifting the perspective of the same agent rather than reifying different selves regulating each other or transforming the self from agent to object

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.

I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone.