Quotes about personality

page 31

Source: Stay

Source: 1Q84

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'
As quoted in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition (2011), Ch. "Community of Man", p. 3
1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned from a Lifetime of Leading

Source: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Source: Clockwork Angel

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: 1Q84

Source: Bless This House

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Source: Eden Close

Source: Secret Vampire

Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Source: Stargirl

Source: Hector and the Search for Happiness

pg 40
Source: Identity (1998)

Source: 11/22/63

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Source: Einstein's Dreams

Source: The Bone People

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Six Rules of Maybe

Source: Avalon High

Source: Love, Stargirl

Source: The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Source: Murder on the Orient Express

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Source: Hunt the Moon

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Source: What Happened to Goodbye

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: Death on the Nile

Source: The Chosen

Source: The City of Mirrors

Source: A Fistful of Charms

Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/bushisms/2009/01/ws_greatest_hits.html http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/how-will-you-remember-george-w-bush <br class="br">2000s, 2008

Source: Gone Girl

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Source: Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels

Source: Ninth Key

Source: Change of Heart

Katniss, p. 117
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Source: As a Man Thinketh

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22-24
The Doors of Perception (1954)
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Context: Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Source: Night World, No. 1

Source: Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills that Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed

Source: Elsewhere

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Source: Faithful Place

Source: Fear and Trembling

Source: The Final Empire

Source: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Source: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Source: Have a Little Faith: a True Story

Source: The Godfather

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Source: There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

Source: The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Man Without Qualities

Source: Infinity

Source: Getting the Girl

Source: Handle with Care

Source: The Kite Runner (2003)
Context: With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Source: Microserfs

Source: Men and Cartoons: Stories

Source: Every Day

Source: Pretties

Source: Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair

Source: Why Not Me?

Variant: because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. no matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.
Source: Just Listen

Source: Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, 1999, p. 51

1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)

As quoted in Dr. Paulos Milkia's "Mengistu Haile Mariam: The Profile of a Dictator", reprinted from the February 1994 Ethiopian Review

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown, pp. 42-3

1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 162.
Trial of Sir Francis Burdett (King v. Burdett) (1820)

Televised address on August 17, 1998 CNN transcript http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/17/speech/transcript.html <br class="br">1990s

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

"Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 681
The 1930s