24+ Gordon Allport Quotes On Personality, Education And Prejudice

Gordon Allport was an American psychologist who is best known for his work on the study of personality. He is considered to be one of the founding figures of personality psychology and is credited with developing the trait theory of personality. Allport's work focused on the individual's unique psychological makeup and how it affects their behavior and interactions with others. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gordon Allport on leadership, love, personality.

Top 10 Gordon Allport Quotes

1. People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
2. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
3. Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.
4. The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.
5. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
6. There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."
7. Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
8. It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed. And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.
9. The theist is persuaded that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, still nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.
10. Personality is and does something...It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual

Gordon Allport Short Quotes

• As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.
• Life is too short so we must generalize.
• Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Gordon Allport Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities. — Gordon Allport

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others. — Gordon Allport

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be? — Gordon Allport

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life. — Gordon Allport

The specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsidiary to our long range intentions. A good parent, a good neighbour, a good citizen, is not good because his specific goals are acceptable, but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values. (1947) — Gordon Allport

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts. — Gordon Allport

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and "patriotism" . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots. — Gordon Allport

Love-incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent-is something that professional psychiatry cannot of itself create, focus, nor release. — Gordon Allport

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems. — Gordon Allport

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score.... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.' — Gordon Allport

It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry. — Gordon Allport

Life Lessons by Gordon Allport

1. Gordon Allport taught that we should strive to be tolerant and accepting of others, regardless of their differences.
2. He also emphasized the importance of understanding the individual and their unique experiences, rather than relying on generalizations or stereotypes.
3. Finally, Allport believed that we should strive to be self-aware and take responsibility for our own actions and beliefs.