Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences

In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.

People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.

What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.

Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.

People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.

People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking.

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

There are countless studies on the negative spillover of job pressures on family life, but few on how job satisfaction enhances the quality of family life.

Give what you possess.

I don't believe there is a God", I said fiercely, "and if there is, He's not the merciful being He's always depicted, or He wouldn't be always torturing me for His own amusement.

Keep people in your life who truly love you, motivate you, and make you happy. If you know people who do none of these things, let them go.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

What we do about our feelings determines the quality of our relationship with ourselves.

I actually don't think that I'm gonna sell a lot of records.

It's not very fun to do spectroscopy.

The dinner hour is a sacred, happy time when everyone should be together and relaxed.

How do you invent a religion?” Evie asked. Will looked over the top of his spectacles. “You say, ‘God told me the following,’ and then wait for people to sign up.

You've got to learn to accept the fool in you as well as the part that's got it goin' on.