Personality Quotes

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense

The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey

Personality is the glitter that sends your little gleam across the footlights and the orchestra pit into that big black space where the audience is.

Mae West, Quoted in: David Ray J

A true personality . . . is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable.

Gustav Mahler, Advice to his wif

As to virtue . . . it is an act of the will, a habit which increases the quantity, intensity and quality of life. It builds up, strengthens and vivifies personality.

Alexis Carrel

I was a personality before I became a person. I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.

Barbra Streisand, Interview with

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.

Oscar Wilde

It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.

Christopher Hitchens

A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.

George H. Mead

Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and darker it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it

Carl Gustav Jung

Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

G. K. Chesterton

People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . in short, the period was so far like the present period . . . .

Charles Dickens

The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes.

Leo Tolstoy

A person's fate is their own temper.

Benjamin Disraeli

People with insufficient personalities are fond of cats. These people adore being ignored.

Henry Morgan

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

Oscar Wilde

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Sigmund Freud

It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guard