We are more heavily invested in the theories of failure than we are in the theories of success.

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

Very often we developed a better grasp of the subjects than the over worked teachers.

People who are burdened by acute misgivings about their coping capabilities suffer much distress and expend much effort in defensive action... they cannot get themselves to do things they find subjectively threatening even though they are objectively safe. They may even shun easily manageable activities because they see them as leading to more threatening events over which they will be unable to exercise adequate control.

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

The adequacy of performance attainments depends upon the personal standards against which they are judged

To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state