personality

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.

If we don't see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed.

Besides the practical knowledge which defeat offers, there are important personality profits to be taken. Defeat strips away false values and makes you realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.

Herein lies the real value of education. Advanced education may or may not make men and women more efficient; but it enriches personality, increases the wealth of the mind, and hence brings happiness. It is the finest insurance against old age, against the growth of physical disability, against the lack and loss of animal delights. How essential it is, then, in youth to acquire some intellectual or artistic tastes, in order to furnish the mind, to be able to live inside a mind with attractive and interesting pictures on the walls.

The principle of happiness should be like the principle of virtue: it should not be dependent of things, but be a part of personality [and character].

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.

A sense of values is the most important single element in human personality.

It has been written: To the cynic the body is no more than a tenement of clay. To the poet, a palace of the soul. To the physician, an all too ailing hulk. The psychiatrist sees it as a housing for the mind and personality. The geneticist sees it as a perpetuation of its own kind. The biologist sees it as an organism which can alter the future as a result of the experience of the past. The anthropologist sees it as an accumulation of culture. Others have viewed the body as essentially just a machine, a concept that sometimes appeals and sometimes appalls. The English satirist Samuel Butler dismissed his fellow men as but "a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole thing fixed upon stilts." But to the more reverent, the bodily mechanism is a masterpiece of precise planning-a delicate and complex apparatus whose various components work as a unit to achieve such diverse feats as scaling a mountain top, building a bridge or composing a symphony.

Economists are people who work with numbers but do not have the personality to be accountants. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If it weren't for caffeine, I'd have no personality whatsoever!