personality Quotes

“There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”

“What is unique about the ‘I’ hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual ‘I’ is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.”

“Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.”

“Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance.”

“Plenty of people are good-looking. That doesn’t make them interesting or intriguing or cool.”

“Martha: I swear…if you existed I’d divorce you…I haven’t been able to see you for years…you’re a blank, a cipher.”

“The personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative.”

“As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.”

“Again I must remind you that A Dog’s a Dog- A CAT’S A CAT.”

“Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has anymore moral sense than a cat. Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had...”

“Clarissa had a theory in those days ... that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death ... perhaps—perhaps.”

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

“About old Mr. Emerson — I hardly know. No, he is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time — beautiful?”

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

“There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.”

“Since every Jack became a gentleman There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.”

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”

“Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems

“Ever since Olly came into my life there’ve been two Maddys: the one who lives through books and doesn’t want to die, and the one who lives and suspects that death will be a small price to pay for it. The first Maddy is surprised at the direction of her thoughts. The second Maddy, the one from the Hawaii photograph? She’s like a god—impervious to cold, famine, disease, natural and man-made disasters. She’s impervious to heartbreak. The second Maddy knows that this pale half life is not really living.”

″‘Then again, you could always just stick with half English and half Israeli, since—’ ‘I’M AMERICAN!’ I shouted. My mother blinked. From the corner of the room where he was looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered, ‘No, you’re not. You’re Jewish.‘”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

“Every time we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, we mean we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.”

“As best anyone could tell, the owner also was a forgiving soul. [Holmes] did not seem at all concerned when now and then a guest checked out without advance notice, leaving her bills unpaid. That he often smelled vaguely of chemicals — that in fact the building as a whole often had a medicinal odor — bothered no one. He was, after all, a physician, and his building had a pharmacy on the ground floor.”

″‘Has anyone ever told you that you have a laugh that makes others want to laugh?’ ‘Doter, my neighbor, always says, ‘Miri’s laugh is a tune you love to whistle.‘”

“Wintermute was hive mind ... effecting change in the world ... Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.”

“More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.”

“Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium.”

“Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. ”

“While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities.”

“Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her... the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.”

“Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night.”

“Wabi-sabi-ness in no way depends on knowledge of the creator’s background or personality. In fact, it is best if the creator is no distinction, invisible, or anonymous.”

“Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. Though I was not aware of it, the next four years were to be the only opportunity for formal study in my life.”

“You know how I always seem to be struggling, even when the situation doesn’t call for it?”

″‘I’m not a box,’ she said ‘I don’t have sides. This is it. One side fits all. This is it.‘”

“Happiness is not a destination. It’s a state of being.”

“Researchers find that whatever a family does do to influence a child’s personality, it affects each child differently, as if each is growing up in a completely different family.”

“You would be much better off in reading this book if you asked yourself who you are, rather than asked who I am, for you cannot understand what I am unless you understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness.”

“Personality is a gestalt of ever-changing perception.”

“How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.”

“…the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. ‘If you want to be a personality, be a pop star.‘”

“Oh, Myrtle you’ve got so much to offer. I don’t care what anyone says, there’s something sweet about every young girl.”

“I would go there with a pretty young woman, a strange woman, a quiet woman.”

“Much of what we call our ‘personalities’ is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something out of the love we were created for.”

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”

″‘If only I knew for sure what the baby will be like’, I said. ‘Take a chance Peter,’ Dad said. ‘The baby won’t necessarily be anything like Fudge.’ ‘But it won’t necessarily not be anything like him either,’ I answered.”

“I’m a bit like stone, content to stay where it is put. Whatever was in Tin and made him such a gypsy, that thing has never been in me.”

“We are influenced by our personality but not controlled by it.”

“We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine.”

″‘There was something funny about him,’ mused her father. ‘One of those- you know- not-to-be-talkedabout- things, and no one did talk about it, so I’ve never found out what it was. I don’t think Dove knew herself. Nothing disgraceful or catching: nothing you’d inherit... just mysterious.‘”

“Fritz had had to stop himself or interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily -as we shall see with Fritz’s own story in a page or two. Still Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

“I’ve often been asked about this personality trait—my ability to maintain composure in the middle of crisis. Sometimes I’ll say that it’s just a matter of temperament, or a consequence of being raised in Hawaii, since it’s hard to get stressed when it’s eighty degrees and sunny and you’re five minutes from the beach. If I’m talking to a group of young people, I’ll describe how over time I’ve trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.”

“Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”

“It’s kind of a good thing, too, when you know your own personality so you don’t need the one the gang makes for you.”

Suspense builds slowly and creates an atmosphere of grim foreboding. However, Nathaniel is the only one of the young people whose personality is distinct, and the fantasy elements in the plot are not fully developed.

“Much of what we call our ‘personalities’ is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something out of the love we were created for.”

“But it was his eyes that marked him out from any other man I had ever seen for they drew you into them somehow so that you could not look away even if you wanted to.”

“Girls will be girls, Miss Slighcarp, and you must allow something for the natural high spirits and excitement attendant on your own arrival and the expected one of her cousin.”

“It’s so very like you, isn’t it? The elegant exterior, the cheap grubby reality inside.”

“It’s five miles; and as you’re evidently bent on talking you might as well talk to some purpose by telling me what you know about ourself.” “Oh, what I know about myself isn’t really worth telling,” said Anne eagerly. “If you’ll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you’ll think it ever so much more interesting.”

Her temper matches her hair I guess.

“That child is hard to understand in some respects. But I believe she’ll turn out all right yet. And there’s one thing certain, no house will ever be dull that she’s in.”

The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination.

He liked Jo, for her odd, blunt ways suited him, and she seemed to understand the boy almost as well as if she had been one herself.

“You get everything you want out of people. I don’t know how you do it, but you are a born wheedler.”

The count was no longer young. He was at least forty; and yet it was easy to understand that he was formed to rule the young men with whom he associated at present. And, to complete his resemblance with the fantastic heroes of the English poet, the count seemed to have the power of fascination.

“A wild, wicked slip she was— but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish: and, after all, I believe she meant no harm; for when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company, and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her.”

“but he looked better when he was animated; that is his everyday countenance: he wanted spirit in general.”

He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure was a little ungainly, as in the days when my knuckles had taken such liberties with it, but it looked as if it would always be light and young.

“I don’t take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a bird’s-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighbourhood.”

″‘I know he has a bad nature,’ said Catherine: ‘he’s your son. But I’m glad I’ve a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him.‘”

I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

“I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.”

“Stop, stop! You queer fish.”

“Oh, you particular gentleman! Principles! You are worked by principles, as it were by springs; you won’t venture to turn round on your own account. If a man is a nice fellow, that’s the only principle I go upon. Zametov is a delightful person.”