Quotes About Character

Freud said to Putnam: We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

If we thus recognise that the aim is to equip the group with the attributes of the individual, we shall be reminded of a valuable remark of Trotter's, to the effect that the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically a continuation of the multicellular character of all the higher organisms.

We assume, in other words, that an anxiety-state is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character. In man, birth provides a prototypic experience of this kind, and we are therefore inclined to regard anxiety-states as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.

Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic 'normality', nor yet to demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task

Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It's not for another to use it for fiction.

Yes, of course, there are also nice people... But we all know niceness is never as interesting to write, or read, about.

I never thought, she went on, that it would be so easy for me to lie. But what must be done can be done.

First, it can never be something we do for God. Second, it is its own end. Third, it is a response to God's total character, more specifically to the triune God. First

And he needed to be able to look at himself in the mirror without having to turn away - he couldn't bear to be less than he hoped he was. It was a virtue and a fault that he would carry with him all his life.

La restitución moral es más fuerte que la restitución material

He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.

El otro, como otro, reviste fácilmente ese carácter maravilloso e inaccesible, pero él a solas consigo, experimenta para sí ese vacío que está en su corazón.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are evil simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Base motives have in them more energy than noble ones. Problem: in what way can the energy belonging to the base motives be transferred to the noble ones?

I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to fight oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose

Jesus' sinlessness should not be equated with emotionlessness.

Evil deeds are the fruit of an evil heart. They are not an aberration from our true self but a revelation of it.

Faithfulness is far more significant than fame when Jesus is building His church.

he delighted in failing to tell cook that the peas were now ripe, and he was given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, and honey-voiced blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved to fire him, but—— Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when he insisted that it was amusing to try to civilize this prize bull.

cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly

You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.

Every fairy-tale needs a good old-fashioned villain?

She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.

A man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really lifelike unless he has some possibilities of that character within him.