Quotes From Psychologist Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) is considered the father of modern social psychology. His work was influenced by Gestalt psychology and stressed the importance of both personal characteristics and the environment in causing behavior. Lewin was also a prolific writer, publishing more than 80 articles and eight books on psychology topics. Below are just a few selected Kurt Lewin quotations.

Selected Kurt Lewin Quotes

These quotes are sourced from works by or about Kurt Lewin:

• "There is nothing so practical as a good theory."
• "If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."
• — From Problems of Theoretical Psychology
• "Intentional action is not the prototype of will-action. It occurs in all forms of transition, from controlled action to uncontrolled, drive-like, field-action. ...Accordingly, the majority of controlled (will) actions are not preceded by an act of intending. Intentional actions are relatively rare. They are prepared actions, where the act of intending, which is as a rule controlled, prepares an uncontrolled field-action."
• — From The Complete Social Scientist: A Kurt Lewin Reader
• "Experience alone does not create knowledge."
• "The chief methodological approach would be that of developing actual group experiments of change, to be carried on in the laboratory or in the field."
• "The American cultural ideal of the self-made man, of everyone standing on his own feet, is as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. We all need each other. This type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to the maturity of individual and group functioning."
• —From The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin
  

The following sections cover quotes from other works of Kurt Lewin.

From A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935)

This book contains reprints of the papers most essential to Lewin's viewpoints:

• "General validity of the law and concreteness of the individual case are not antitheses...reference to the totality of the concrete whole situation must take the place of reference to the largest possible historical collection of frequent repetitions."
• "This means methodologically that the importance of a case, and its validity as proof, cannot be evaluated by the frequency of its occurrence. Finally, it means for psychology, as it did for physics, a transition from an abstract classificatory procedure to an essentially concrete constructive method."
• "Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality."

From Resolving Social Conflicts (1948)

This book covers Lewin's interest in the causes of social conflict and his efforts to uncover techniques for preventing and, as the title states, resolving them.

• "Social action, just like physical action, is steered by perception."
• "Our behavior is purposeful; we live in a psychological reality or living space that includes not only those parts of our physical and social environment that are important to us but also imagined states that do not currently exist."
• "A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way, he steadily raises his level of aspiration."

From Field Theory in Social Science (1951)

This work outlines 11 papers critical to Lewin's constructs of social science and major findings derived from his research:

• "Learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process."
• "It has been frequently misunderstood and interpreted to mean that field theorists are not interested in historical problems or in the effect of previous experience. Nothing can be more mistaken. In fact, field theorists are most interested in development and historical problems and have certainly done their share to enlarge the temporal scope of the psychological experiment from that of the classic reaction time experiment, which lasts only a few seconds, to experimental situations, which contain a systematically created history throughout hours or weeks."