Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Personality

"In your attempt to break down the boundaries of a personality you are building a new prison for yourself." - Dag Hammarskjöld

"The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time." - Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

"The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of American is grounded in principles and not on any single personality." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR

"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure." - Grayson Kirk, fully Grayson Louis Kirk

"At moments of crisis, where the roads to disintegration or to development separate, as on a watershed, a single decisive personality, or a small group of informed and purposeful men, may be a slight push determine the direction and movement of an otherwise uncontrollable mass of conflicting social forces… Only within the compass of the person can a total change be affected within the span of a single generation, sufficient to produce the necessary effect on civilization at large: like the seed crystal, he passes on to the whole new order of the part." - Lewis Mumford

"Why indeed must “God” be a noun?... The anthropomorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey that God is BE-ing." - Mary Daly

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

"When Judaism speaks of immortality… its primary meaning is that man contains something independent of the flesh and surviving it; his consciousness and moral capacity; his essential personality; a soul." - Milton Steinberg

"Life/personality must be taken as a total entity. All of your life is all of your life, and no one incident stands alone." - Nikki Giovanni, fully Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni

"Love is a very complex emotion, requiring a richness of personality and a great variety of talents.. It develops also into the abstract feeling for things or ideas, for beauty and learning, and, finally, into a feeling for the Supreme Being." - Norman Vincent Peale

"We are what we think we are. The habitual inclination of our thoughts determines our talents and abilities, and our personality... So whatever you want to be, start to develop that pattern now. You can instill any trend in your consciousness right now, provided you inject a strong thought in your mind; then your actions and whole being will obey that thought. One must never give up the hope of becoming better." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Health depends to a large extent on mental attitudes and even upon the spiritual condition of the personality." - Paul Tournier

"The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality but must live with a character." -

"I believe in a spiritual world not as something separate from this world, but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw, we must feel this truth that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance, drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." -

"Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation. These are limitations of our culture, of the categories and ways of thinking we have inherited, not limitations of individuals... who inhabit this culture." - Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah

"Parents should live for their children, but not through them; the parents whose satisfactions are wholly reflections of their children's achievements are as much monsters as the parents who neglect their offspring. Nothing can deform a personality so much as the burden of a love that is utterly self-sacrificing." -

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"Prayer does not change God, it changes us. It deepens insight, increases intuitive perceptions, expands consciousness. It transforms personality. Prayer opens doors to let in God and let out self, to let in love and let out hate, to let in faith and let out fear. Prayer helps us to find ourselves. By praying not to get more, but to be more, we discover a way to serve, a purpose for which to live, a dream to make real... Prayer is thinking and thanking. It is thinking of our many blessings and accepting them with a thankful spirit." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"Tomorrow’s memory depends upon today’s impressions... Your memory builds your personality, your personality builds your character, and your character determines your destiny." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"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." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"One social structure will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him. The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear." - Felix Adler

"Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being and is subject to the law of the mental unity of crowds." - Gustave Le Bon

"The Enneagram is a psychological and spiritual system with roots in ancient traditions. Traces of it can be found in Sufism, Judaism, and specifically, in the seven capital tendencies of early Christianity. These seven capital tendencies, anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth, along with two general traits everyone shares, deceit and fear, make up the nine personality types of the Enneagram. Each personality type on the nine-pointed star of the Enneagram can be seen as a pointer to a constellation of tendencies, perspectives, and habitual perceptions characteristic to each type. In Enneagram study, these constellations of motivation are called passions, and each one colors how we experience ourselves, our relationships and the world around us. The purpose of Enneagram studies is gain insight into how these passions and compulsions operate in ourselves and others, thereby fostering self-understanding and empathy, giving rise to improved relationships." - Helen Palmer

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"I believe that love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve." - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

"The greatest adventure that can happen to a human being is the movement from mind to no-mind, the movement from personality to individuality. The no-mind has an individuality: the mind is social." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner

"Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food. " - Lewis Mumford

"We, and all things, exist in God’s infinitude now; our individuality battens within it; our personality grows strong because of it; and we know, if we know anything, that while the more we approach the good the more we please God, at the same time the more men approach the good the more nobly distinctive, the more beautifully individual, do their characters become. To imagine, then, that at the end of this life we shall cease to exist as conscious beings, that our characters, our personalities, will fall back into some boundless being, instead of becoming more and more definite, more and more individual, is certainly not to exalt God; for it is founded on the belief, either that God is now belittled by our present individuality, or that our present individuality is a mere delusion. In the latter case God, whom we find in the depths of our souls, is doubtless also a delusion, for if the self is not real it is no respectable witness on whose testimony we can accept God. Our deepest mature conviction is that finite and infinite interpenetrate, as time and eternity interpenetrate, and our problems must be solved in the light of that conviction." - Lily Dougall

"Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

"None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

"The ''self-image'' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior." - Maxwell Maltz

"The names we use to describe personality traits - such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid - refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. At the same party, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business conacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life eihther rich or miserable." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"To the mystic, the mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a Unique Other Self, transcending, encompassing, and momentarily suppressing the private personality of the subject of experience." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

"Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing “consumerism” while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power. Aside from the costs involved, most people quite rightly do not want to “live simply.” They do not want to diminish their freedom to travel or their access to culture, or to scale down needs that often serve to enrich human personality and sensitivity." - Murray Bookchin

"The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself." - Paul Cézanne

"At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance." - Paul Tournier

"Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"When a physiologist speaks now of the life of a plant or of an animal, he sees rather an agglomeration, a colony of millions of separate individuals than a personality one and indivisible. He speaks of a federation of digestive, sensual, nervous organs, all very intimately connected with one another, each feeling the consequence of the well-being or indisposition of each, but each living its own life. Each organ, each part of an organ in its turn is composed of independent cellules which associate to struggle against conditions unfavorable to their existence. The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life /subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality /no human being's education can have a safe foundation." - Phyllis Bottome, aka Phyllis Forbes Dennis (married name)

"A person however learned and qualified in his life's work in whom gratitude is absent, is devoid of that beauty of character which makes personality fragrant." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collectivity; no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cog-wheel in the Communist system." -

"There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves. " - Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander

"There is no death. The thing that we call death is but another, sadder name for life. There is no hope—the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time. We grow like flowers, and bear desire, the odor of the human flowers. Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born. We love in others what we lack ourselves, and would be everything but what we are." - R. H. Stoddard, fully Richard Henry Stoddard

"Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt