Persona

“ You have the choice of observing the personality through the medium of events, or events through the medium of personality. Of the two, the latter is to be preferred. To understand the personality we heed to know whether it controls and directs events, or merely receives them. Into every life a large measure of chance enters. Does the personality merely receive the events, or does it master chance? ”

“ We have our choice of interpreting them as resulting from his personality or of determining his personality as revealed by the deeds. In general it is better to view deeds and events in the light of personality. ”

“ To know how to deal with such men—to know how to use them—is the problem which ambitious force is called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force of character, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. ”

“ The Latin persona originally meant an actor's mask; [50] then the part you play in a drama, as we say "dramatis personæ"; then the part you play in life, the responsible individual who eats, drinks, studies, marries and dies. When there is a collective individuality we talk about a "persona moralis," as in the case of a corporation. ”

“ But there may be in a life some general direction, some continuous thread, due to a few dominant ideas and a few strong feelings, that explain the life and are characteristic of a human personality. Of my life, which has not been easy on the whole, I have described the general course and the essential features, and I trust that my story gives an understanding of the state of mind in which I have lived and worked. ”

“ The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an accomplished fact. ”

“ It is therefore in the first place concerned to personify abstract conditions of a general character or similar qualities both from the human and the natural world, such as religion, love, justice, strife, fame, war, peace, the seasons, death, and the like, and conceive them under the mode of personality. ”

“ but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly. ”

“ While, therefore, in coming into this much to be desired state, our personality is more and more keenly felt, our trust in, and reliance on, the Lord, and our perception of Him as our light, our life, our all, become also more and more inwardly realized. ”

“ If I may venture a suggestion as to how it does confer peculiar strength to expressions, it is that it brings into especial prominence the idea of Personality; it directs all subjects of discourse by the notion of an individual, a living, personal unit. ”

“ The sensuous impulse is awakened with the experience of life—with the beginning of the individual; the rational impulsion with the experience of law—with the beginning of his personality; and it is only when these two inclinations have come into existence that the human type is realized. ”

“ In them we find a complete personality—a whole man, and that a man of mark. This important personage, who possesses no great acuteness of observation as far as humanity in general is concerned, who, in fact, occupies himself very little with humanity in general, has focussed all his acuteness upon the one subject which really interests him, his own ego, and has half consciously, half unconsciously, but in any case very completely, revealed and exhibited it to us. ”

“ During that long period of time, the most delicate gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, were presented to the contemplation of the consciousness which gave them being, in appropriate types. ”

“ By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?" What more valuable for the elevation of our own character? ”

“ Here, then, we have in one volume three aspects of human life as seen within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and that vision, for the instruction of other men. ”

“ Control by the subjective mind nearly always produces in the subject either a feeling of dual personality, in which two egos are realized, each distinct from the other—the old me and the new me—or else the subjective mind is identified with a totally distinct, extrinsic and usually superior individual ”

“ The person, in other words, is the visible or tangible phenomenon of something inward—the phase or function by which an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human intercourse and interaction, and plays his peculiar and definite part in life. [4] But this totality of consciousness, so far from reducing man to a 'mere manufactured article,' gives to personality its unique distinction. By personality all things are dominated. ”

“ But these are typical of the exceptional few; the great majority have bona fide personality forms, forms which are individually characteristic, and which are recognizable and personally distinguishable. ”

“ Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious. ”

“ It implants ideals of personal character by disclosing the personal qualities and moral accomplishments of men and women who have, in large ways, affected history, and who have in consequence received lasting honor and renown. ”

“ We shall analyse that complication of mental qualities which form what, in common life, we call personal merit: We shall consider every attribute of the mind, which renders a man an object either of esteem and affection, or of hatred and contempt ”

“ What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education. ”

“ He can take a human personality, made in His own image, pregnant, formative, causative, in all its living thought, sensibility, and will, and can throw it freely upon its task of thinking and expression—and behold, the product will be His ”

“ The third attitude would so understand the admitted identity of the Personality observed as practically to identify also the simultaneous and successive observers and observations, and to eliminate all variety and growth in that spirit’s own inner life and in its apprehension by other minds. ”

“ But those that are peculiar to, or acquire a dominating position and influence in the personality, play their part—and even a greater part than the primitive instinctive dispositions—in distinguishing the character of one personality from that of another. For 534in a large measure they determine the reaction to situations, the behavior and the modes of thought as intellectual processes. ”

“ We classify people by new categories. We look for personality, for sincerity, for social sympathy, for democratic feeling, for social productiveness, and we interpret success in terms of these attainments. ”

“ It is upon that discipline chiefly that those qualities which I have called the moral qualities of the personal order, and which have their root in truthfulness and courage, depend for their evolution. ”

“ Exactly that in which the characteristic quality of the world and of life is found, the individual personalities, the single generations, the concrete events—these lose, in this view, their own particular worth. ”

“ The Testimonies of several great, learned, and virtuous personages among the Gentiles, urged against the excesses of the age, in favour of the self-denial, temperance, and piety, recommended in the first part of this discourse. ”

“ In order that the tendencies I have described should acquire their full force, it was necessary that they should be represented or illustrated in some great personage, who, by the splendour and the beauty of his career, could fascinate the imaginations of men. ”

“ These reserves being made, our definition of character has the advantage of supplying us with a criterion which remarkably simplifies our task; for it is clear that, among the innumerable individuals of the human species, there must be some, and these by far the greater number, who have neither unity nor stability nor personal characteristics 386peculiar to themselves. ”

“ Since it is the source of personalities, it is the source of power, mysterious and far-reaching, everywhere enveloping the beholder. It is true this power, in order to become effectual, must clothe itself with personal attributes. ”

“ There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage. ”

“ and you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age." ”

“ It is the merit of psychology to have shown the true nature of this relationship between personal and extra-personal, which was in the past a source of an infinity of mistaken ideas—revelation, inspiration, possession, direct communion with angels, saints, gods, or devils, and so forth. ”

“ When we speak of the ego, do we mean the self of to-day, or of yesterday, or of some years back—or possibly some years in the future when we shall have found the expression now unhappily denied us? Do we mean the self of boyhood, or even of babyhood? or do we mean that of maturity, or of old age? Do we mean the self indicated by the mind alone, or by the spirit, apart from the body? ”

“ When we recount the activity of his life, when we contemplate the dignity of his character and of his course, and how exceptional it has been, what an example it is for us! Should we not be tending upward too and continually so? ”

“ Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason—that character is to the soul! ”

“ Give him simple, lifelike character; that is all he wants. "For me, the only condition of character is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to know what was human, I should study humanity." ”

“ They hold up for imitation all those cardinal virtues of love and self-sacrifice,—which is the ultimate criterion of character,—of courage, loyalty, kindness, gentleness, fairness, pity, endurance, bravery, industry, perseverance, and thrift. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ Now it is this selective character of every rational conscious process, a character as manifest to consciousness as it is ultimately significant for the constitution of all Being, — it is this character, I say, which to my mind is responsible above all for the Individuality which we have already characterized as belonging to the whole of Being, and which we shall now find as equally characistic of every region of finite Being. ”

“ I concede to you conscientious motives in what you do. You are sustained by those around you, men of intellect, men of character. I respect them while I differ from them. I appeal, however, to a higher law, and that, I think, sustains me. ”

“ And in that day shall be discovered every inward working of every human soul: every appetite, passion, inclination, affection, with the various combinations of them, with every temper and disposition that constitute the whole complex character of each individual. ”

“ Such portraitures of human peculiarities, gauged by their moral or social desirability as examples to be followed or avoided, form an attractive compendium for the interpretation of men and their ways. Their consideration, ranging from gossip to philosophy, supplies the common touch of nature that makes the world of every time and clime akin, and presents graphically for our psychological contemplation the outward issues of disposition as shaped by opportunity and circumstance. ”

“ Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life—a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times. ”

“ Rest on the human faces that pass by,
Each with its gay or busy interest:
And then I muse upon their lot, and read
Many a lesson in their changeful cast,
And so grow kind of heart, as if the sight
Of human beings were humanity. ”