Personal

“ All I can say is, that the longer I live the more I am convinced that it is personal character which most helps the world forward, and I think our hearty allegiance to the truth which we clearly see will in the end teach us new truth. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Another token of the higher life, which indeed is implied in the former, is the habit of taking what is called an objective or Impersonal View of our personal relations. This is especially important as helpful to self-control. ”

“ What affects me more than all, is what relates to myself, for it has always been a habit of mine to bring everything to a personal test, to weigh it upon my own scales. These questions I have often asked, “Why was I created as I was, in a condition where I had to come in contact with vice in my earliest years? ”

“ But you'll learn it is true. You'll understand later on why I am always talking about a Person; why to know that Personal Being is life. Meanwhile, thank you very, very much for what you have taught me. ”

“ The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? ”

“ 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. ”

“ We get a glimpse here of a strangely individual personality, reserved and proud, conscious of his destiny, working it out in a haughty exclusiveness; wrapt up in high thoughts and cultivating in the retirement of private life a rare refinement. ”

“ Of his own people he may write with a sympathetic personal interest born of close contact with them, with knowledge of their whims, their excellences, their deficiencies, and their wants. His purpose is to interest them. ”

“ What became now of all the beautiful light of Grace and Revelation? persuasion! nothing else! impress of personality on personality! as the teacher impels the child, the market crier his peasants, the general his loyal soldiers, the judge the timid witness, and as the ruling idea - public opinion - impels every individual, wholly beyond all reason or judgment, or absolute sense, no matter how strongly, we all may imagine the contrary. ”

“ The maintenance of the individuality is thus demonstrably a duty. The assertion of personal claims is essential; both as a means to self-happiness, which is a unit in the general happiness, and as a means to furthering the general happiness altruistically. ”

“ The recognition by {18} psychology of respect for personality as one of the three or four most fundamental conditions—if not the most essential of all—of happiness, of character, and of influence, is explicit confirmation of the truth of this element of the social consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul that when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and command enters with you, and every one is impress’d with your Personality? O the magnet! the flesh over and over! Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness, Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Personality, that supreme moral and emotional factor in human life, must of necessity create an atmosphere about it, permeated with its individual tastes and mental attributes, distinct and powerful in proportion to its individual distinction and its strength. ”

“ Their persons, features, look, gait, gesture, familiar to our thoughts, vividly engraven. They address themselves to every one of us personally, in tones that thrill and chill, or that convulse us with merriment—and all for pleasure! They ask our sympathy, but they task it not. ”

“ When we commune with ourselves we are, at the same moment, the subject and the object of our own experience. The self that sees may fittingly be called the father of our personality, and with equal propriety the self that we see may be called the begotten of our personality. ”

“ One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world. ”

“ As physical life propagates and thus continues itself, so personality is transmitted in unconscious innumerable ways. The step and carriage of the body, the glance of the eye, the work of our hands, our silences no less than our speech, all express what we are. As everything follows upon what we are, so our responsibility is to be, to be ourselves completely, perfectly. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is nothing left to say of him which he did not cheerfully and truthfully say of himself. "I am intensely interested in my own personality," he began one day; "but we are all interesting to ourselves, or ought to be. ”

“ But, if so, where is the difficulty of my object being one and the same with the object of other people; so that, having filled the form of my personality with a life not merely mine, I have at heart, and have identified with and made one with myself, objective interests, things that are to be, and in and with the existence of which I am not to satisfy my mere private self ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,' and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-consciousness is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native prompting exists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus expressed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The primary self alone possesses true personality, will, and self-control. The primary self alone is a law unto itself,—a personality having the power of investigating its own nature, of discovering faults, creating ideals, striving after them, struggling for them, and by efforts of will attaining to higher and higher stages of personality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, 180 which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality. ”

“ And so together, for a long decade, these two great souls toiled in the solitude of home just as together they fought in the open field, not for personal gain or glory, but for the sake of a cause to which they had consecrated their lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And this, too, in such a way that we are forced to consider the same determinations at one time as personified in the self-subsistent and Divine personality, and at another that which appears most essentially to belong to the human heart. ”

“ As I have already remarked, the personality of the man is two-thirds, and his intellect, his words, are but one-third. It is the real man, the personality of the man, that runs through us. ”

“ But that which is easiest and quickest need not be best. What influence each of us most deeply in our personal lives are intangible matters, feelings and desires that are hard to define and that are set apart from the daily occupation. ”

“ One of the most marked tests of character is the manner in which we conduct ourselves towards others. A graceful behaviour towards superiors, inferiors, and equals, is a constant source of pleasure. It pleases others because it indicates respect for their personality ”

“ I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself—which is in a certain way the whole Universe—and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. ”

“ It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We discern some of the roots of our own being, and appreciate one side of our own character better—both as loving it and as noting where its weak points lie—when we see it thus remotely working in a bygone world and under outlived fashions, yet keeping so intimately true to the genius of the type. We get a glimpse of our vocation, see that we stand for a spirit that human life will always need to have expressed. ”

“ 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. ”