Gordon W. Allport > Quotes

“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.”
― Gordon W. Allport

“It is here that we encounter the
central theme of existentialism:
to live is to suffer, to survive is to
find meaning in the suffering. If
there is a purpose in life at all,
there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself,
and must accept the responsibility
that his answer prescribes.”
― Gordon W. Allport

“Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.”
― Gordon Willard Allport

“Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.”
― Gordon Willard Allport

“Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.”
― Gordon W. Allport

“... to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.”
― Gordon Allport

“Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

“Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

“People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

“To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.”
― Gordon W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

“Much of our life is spent wishing others understood us better than they do.”
― Gordon W. Allport

“The answer to growing complexity in the social sphere is renewed efforts at participation by each one of us, or else a progressive decline of inert and unquestioning masses submitting to government by an elite which will have little regard for the ultimate interest of the common man.”
― Gordon Willard Allport

“The surest way to lose truth is to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.”
― Gordon Allport

“We may lay it down as a general law applying to all social phenomena that multiple causation is invariably at work and nowhere is the law more clearly applicable that to prejudice.”
― Gordon W. Allport