Behavioral Roots Quotes

I'm not interested in how people move; I'm interested in what makes them move.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.

Nobody's born evil. I guess that's why we're drawn to violence. We're fascinated by it, but there's a moral in how you examine it.

Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.

I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose that.

The way we behave, our views and outlooks really have their sources some place. They come from somewhere. Sometimes we don't even know what they are, and yet they're very powerful in our lives.

The mingled incentives which lead to action are often too subtle and lie too deep for us to analyze.

I like understanding what's underneath, what's really motivating people. When I was younger, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, so I think it has to do with that.

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.