Quotes About Personality

“I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Strength of character means the ability to overcome resentment against others, to hide hurt feelings, and to forgive quickly.”
― Lawrence G. Lovasik

“How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer 

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom 

 “Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons 

“The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's 

“It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago  

“I really like you better aimless and lost among people, a little crazy, oddball, not looking like yourself. So that I don't know you at all and the nearer I get to you the more you separate yourself from me-- I get dizzy trying to follow you and I have to work really hard-- and that's what I want!”
― Alia Mamdouh, The Loved Ones: A Modern Arabic Novel 

“In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.”
― Fernando Pessoa

 “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, The Picture of Dorian Gray 

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room