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.

Gaining insight into one's underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process

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

The effects of outcome expectancies on performance motivation are partly governed by self-beliefs of efficacy

It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior

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.

Stringent standards of self-evaluation [can] make otherwise objective successes seem to be personal failures