Quotes by Gordon W. Allport

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

“There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didnt like;”

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.

Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.

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.

People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

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.

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.