Personality

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.
- Laurette Taylor, 1914

Personality is the particular combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral response patterns of an individual.

Quotes

• What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it.
  • Elizabeth Bowen (1929) The Last September

• We moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. During the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. … But at the turn of the (20th) century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic.
  • Susan Cain (2012) "Quiet, Please: Unleashing 'The Power Of Introverts'," NPR, January 30, 2012.

• Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality … is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.
  • Susan Cain (2012) "Why the world needs introverts," The Guardian, March 13, 2012 quoting Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

• Personality is the knowledge that we are apart from the rest of the universe.
  • Ernest Dimnet (1932) What we live by. p. 22

• Methods are transient: personality is enduring.
  • Edward Hopper 'statement by the Chairman of the Jury', Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1951, p. 7

• In man, personality is usually defined with reference to self-consciousness rather than to individuality; but the power of reflection and self-knowledge is linked up, in our type of personality at least, with the new flight of individuality — conscious memory seems necessarily to imply a vast increase of independence, so that it is all one whether we define the possessor of personality as a self-conscious individual, or as an individual whose individuality is more extensive both in space and time than the material substance of his body.
  Personality, as we know it, is free compared with the individuality of the lower animals; but it is still weighted down with the body. There may be personalities which have not merely transcended substance, but are rid of it altogether: in all ages the theologian and the mystic have told of such "disembodied spirits," postulated by the one, felt by the other, and now the psychical investigator with his automatic writing and his cross-correspondences is seeking to give us rigorous demonstration of them. If such exist, they crown Life's progress...
  • Julian Huxley (1912) "The Individual in the Animal Kingdom" ; quoted in From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences (1992) by Connie Barlow, Ch. 6 "Blurred Bounds of Individuality"

• For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role.
  • Sam Keen (1983) The Passionate Life. p. 135-136

• Personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)

• A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.
  • Søren Kierkegaard (1843) Journals IV A 87

• I think the personality is formed at that time, for the good and for the bad. … We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way. But, I don't know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it.
  • Morrissey From a radio interview by Jed the fish (1997)

• Personality is the supreme value, and should be regarded as an end and not merely as a means to an end.
  • Kirby Page (1932) The Personality of Jesus

• Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.
  • Laurette Taylor The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)

• The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
  • Oscar Wilde (1895) The Soul of Man Under Socialism