Self Reinforcement Quotes & Sayings

Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism. — Cass R. Sunstein

It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his
own plainest faith.
He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful
as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.
Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them
for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind. — Herman Melville

I didn't see it happening, but the wheels were falling off of me. I didn't care about responsibilities like paying rent, I was just on a runaway train ride. The horribly ironic cosmic trick of drug addiction is that drugs are a lot of fun when you first start using them, but by the time the consequences manifest themselves, you're no longer in a position to say, 'Whoa, gotta stop that.' You've lost that ability, and you've created this pattern of conditioning and reinforcement. It's never something for nothing when drugs are involved. — Anthony Kiedis

Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not like the men who served as a cannon fodder in World War I, dug into the trenches of a senseless and apparently interminable conflict, while lobbing bullets and canisters of poison gas at a supposed enemy, who, like any soldier, just wanted to get off the battlefield and on with a potentially productive and rewarding life. — Stephen Jay Gould

We live in a largely addictive society that continues to reinforce the defenses we learned as children; this reinforcement comes in the form of a negative social pressure to soothe ourselves, to try to obtain instant gratification ... Many people who suffered deprivation in childhood continue to accept substitute gratifications in the forms of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, television, video games, overwork, and other activities that distract them from experiencing their real lives. — Lisa Firestone

I've felt that if you dwell too much on your errors, you're dealing in the negativity of things. I don't like that. I'd rather work on the positive reinforcement, the things I did well. — Hale Irwin

I found this deer toy that poops out candy. And so if I say, 'Cree, you have to go to bed right now. You will get a candy.' We've named the pooping deer 'Gus.' ... He gets a jelly bean. And it works. Positive reinforcement is the way to go. I'm learning things like that which help me be a better parent. — Tia Mowry

On the contrary, as Miller also notes, "Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and ... its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal." For the tragic view indicates that we take seriously man's freedom and his need to realize himself; it demonstrates our belief in the "indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity. — Rollo May

The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom. — Carol Bly

In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. — Aldous Huxley

I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galile and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time ... The tactic reached its goal completely. The building of the police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned ... — Yigal Allon

Consult ... /what reinforcement we may gain from hope,/If not, what resolution from despair. — John Milton

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn't just skills like computer technology. It's the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command. — Steven Pressfield

The way you engage someone's pain either reinforces their pain or helps to release it. — Bryant McGill

It takes energy, mental toughness and spiritual reinforcement to successfully deal with life's opportunities, and to reach your objectives. — Zig Ziglar

We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected. — Tali Sharot

we tend to retreat into tribes, guided primarily by our uninformed rage. And we naturally hunger for reinforcement. Television news shows rise to the occasion, offering shouting matches between caricatured opposites competing for ratings. Elected officials are ridiculed as "wonks" for sharing or even understanding multiple viewpoints, the history of an issue, or its greater context. We forget that these are the people we're paying to learn about these issues on our behalf. Instead, we overvalue our own opinions on issues about which we are ill informed, and undervalue those who are telling us things that are actually more complex than they look on the surface. They become the despised "elite." Appropriately — Douglas Rushkoff

You always remember the things that rub you the right way or the wrong way. The positive and negative are both powerful memory reinforcement tools. Negative is more powerful than positive, which is based on your survival instincts. But you can't remember something that doesn't touch you in a positive or negative way. And this is our ultimate goal. We must learn from the wallflowers, life's most perfect unintentional losers. — Shane Kuhn

To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement. — B.F. Skinner

The dichotomy is delicious. Inside the fantasy genre, I try to present women who need to solve real problems like having no voice in community, or no right to work; no access to capital to start a business. No reinforcement for talent. — Stella Atrium

At best a practitioner of the Cult of Happy will accept in terms of personal accountability is that they were "too negative." So if people won't be accountable for their own actions, there is little reason to believe that they will be accountable for the actions they perpetrate against others. Similar to a narcissist they will, through their own mental engineering, retreat either to their particular "Cult of Happy Dogma" internally, or to the insulating bubble of like minded followers who will offer reinforcement, similar to narcissistic supply, saying, "There's nothing wrong with you, that person is just negative and you don't need that in your life. — Robert Montgomerie

Every word you speak is a prayer, or meditation of reinforcement which creates permanence. — Bryant McGill

Carrot-and-stick reinforcement' the behaviorists are telling us is needed for this bird to carry out these operations, thirteen different types of construction jobs? B. F. Skinner did a very good thing: in World War — William Peter Blatty

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement. — B.F. Skinner

Knowing European manhood's boundaries to be porous and needing reinforcement, and meeting Indigenous possibilities that threw such boundaries into question, early conquerors invoked berdache as if assigning a failure to differentiate sex to Indigenous people, but they did so to define sexual normativity for them all. Thus, if colonial observers invoked berdache to mark Indigenous difference, the aim was to teach both colonial and Indigenous subjects the relational terms of colonial heteropatriarchy. — Scott L. Morgensen

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese. — H.L. Mencken

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest. — Michael Shermer

My fear is you have to be careful as a writer to not get caught up in social media and blogging, because it can start to feed into your writing time. When you are writing a book, it's such a long journey where the payoff is way at the end, sometimes years away. The payoff of the blog post is today. You get the reinforcement, comments or "likes" immediately. It's appealing. You have to be patient with the book. — Matt De La Pena

In the non-material scenario, both temple or total quality gets raised, deploying communication as mortar, culture as reinforcement, and commitment as concrete. — Priyavrat Thareja

Cats make one of the most satisfying sounds in the world: they purr. [ ... ] Almost all cats make us feel good about ourselves because they let us know they feel good about us, about themselves, and about our relationship with them. A purring cat is a form of high praise, like a gold star on a test paper. It is a reinforcement of soemthing we would all like to believe about ourselves
that we are nice. — Roger A. Caras

During the Weekly Tactical, there are two overriding goals: resolution of issues and reinforcement of clarity. Obstacles need to be identified and removed, and everyone needs to be on the same page. — Patrick Lencioni

We cannot learn something new and stick to it without a modular approach to application, positive reinforcement and a real change of environment. — David Amerland

Allah set Hajj for the consolidation and reinforcement of the religion. — Fatima Bint Muhammad

So what's all the fuss?" he asked instead. "Where's all the shit coming from?"
Dean told him. He tried to make it concise, using flash words such as "fire" and "conspiracy" and "big
freakin' shape-shifter," and told Roland, too, about Miri and Robert and Kevin. The red jade.
"You're both fucked," Roland said. "Seriously. I'll start arranging the funeral now."
"I want a happy boss. Where's the positive reinforcement?"
"Buried with Pollyanna in my backyard. Which is where you'll be if you don't play your cards right. — Marjorie M. Liu

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement. — Robert Trivers

Science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on the mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics. — Yuval Noah Harari

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. — Albert Camus

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount. — B.F. Skinner