c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Frog in the mud is happier than the man, because it has no ambition to reach the stars!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Today's politicians are like policemen on traffic duty. They are just dealing with traffic right in front of them. Yet they want to be the Superintendent based on that alone. The politicians and the bigwigs in finance have no ambition. There are too many who confuse the power that they got by their position as their own ability.
— Jirō Shirasu
Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.
— Steve Jobs
If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing.
— Habeeb Akande
Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
Ambition is the bridge between reality and living a dream.
— Addoo S. Mukhtar
Ambition was a dull pain, like a continually broken heart.
— Enid Shomer, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
In the closeness of the passage, the queen could smell the other woman's perfume, a musky scent that spoke of moss and earth and wildflowers. Under it, she smelled ambition.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
The finest of athletes have, along with skill, a few more essential qualities: to conduct their life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and modesty. All these, are totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness
— Donald Bradman
In the days when I was ambitious I worked out a very pretty little plan for conquering the whole earth and rearranging things as they ought to be; and when, in the end, everything became so good it almost began to be boring, then I was going to stuff my pockets with as much money as I could lay hands on and creep away, vanish in some cosmopolis and sit at a corner cafe and drink absinthe and enjoy seeing how everything went to the devil as soon as I wasn't on the scene any more.
— Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
— Emil M. Cioran
Look beyond what you can see, Think Potential
— Samer Chidiac
Without drive you will never get anywhere in life.
— Habeeb Akande
Roger was not personally ambitious
—  he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.
Talented people hit targets no one else can hit. Ambitious people aim to hit targets no one else can see.
— Addoo S. Mukhtar
There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?
— Ali Sheikh, Closure of the Helpdesk — A Geek Tragedy
It was such a feeling of developing your inner self to the people who liked to dig deeper and deeper until you cannot fathom the deepest evil in you.
— Fernando Lachica, OFW: This is My Life and Story
Ambitious people understand intelligent people far better than intelligent people understand ambitious people; therefore, ambition will always triumph over intelligence. Once you appreciate this reality, civilization becomes clearer and unfortunately, more distressing.
— D.A. Blankinship, The Scoloderus Conspiracy
A king of a kingdom no one fucking knows about! I'm the tree in the forest that silently falls--when no one is around to be crushed! [Lothaire, Enemy of Old]
— Kresley Cole, Shadow's Claim
Being with him made me want to make my own dreams, discover my own path. I was my best self when I was with him.
— Heather Anastasiu, Glitch
Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
— Aristotle, Politics
everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking...
— Baruch Spinoza
To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.
— D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
I thrice presented him a kingly crown. Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow.
— William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
— Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties
If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.
— Habeeb Akande
The fuel of ambition is not the problem
—  it is the focus of ambition that frees or betrays us.
Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
— Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing
From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.
— Hunter S. Thompson
My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world.
— George H. Hepworth, Brown Studies, or Camp Fires and Morals
...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.
— Alexander McCall Smith, Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams
The only way the weight of the world can break you down, is if you carry it the wrong way.
— Lionel Suggs
THE EMPRESS LO was not beautiful but she was ambitious and, sometimes, ambition can take you further than beauty. The women of the court never wondered how she got this far because as all women know, the rise to power is relatively simple ~ especially if it is a man who has control. ~ from the Three Lives of Empress Lo. Forthcoming.
— Hope Barrett
Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.
— William Shakespeare
The visions of a healthy brain,Give us pleasure over and again;For this home was done,From the daytime dreams of one.
— Omar Kiam
There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
I've always been very confident in my immaturity.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.
— Beatrix Potter
...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
I use bits and pieces of others personalities to form my own.
— Kurt Cobain, Journals
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
I'm THAT complicated, mysterious, yet content with the "simple" things in life. Don't try to understand me; you won't figure me out. But you're free to like me the way I am.
— Marwa Ayad
I'd rather be a little weird than all boring.
— Rebecca McKinsey
I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.
— Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
I just hope I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.
— Kurt Cobain
Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have courage to complain, that's their problem.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I'm currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Covenant
I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse -- the things which often make dialogue impossible.And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Gansey had always felt as if there were two of him: the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone, and then, the other, more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly earnest, driven by naive longing.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
Just because a person chooses to express themselves in an extreme way doesn't mean they have an extreme personality.
— Susane Colasanti, Take Me There
My mother finally took me to a child psychologist, who knew exactly what I was, but she just couldn’t accept it and kept trying to tell my folks I was reading their body language and was very observant, so I had good reason to imagine I heard people’s thoughts. Of course, she couldn’t admit I was literally hearing people’s thoughts because that just didn’t fit into her world.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark
It's just that it's impossible to be a broken or whole person. You can only be a person. You can only exist, you can only belong to yourself, and you can only be responsible for your own happiness or belonging or whatever. That broken-part-piece-whole thing is just a trick of the mortal mind.
— Jackson Pearce
I’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.
— Charles M. Schulz
We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards.
— Nick Webb
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Oh, Wax has always been solemn, but when he's at his best, there's a smirk underneath.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Alloy of Law
I'm told I'm very charming when people do what I want.
— Steven Brust, Tiassa
At once, it’s clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don’t have the arrogance. Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious By the end of the session, I am no one at all.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
If there is a true measure of a person's soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full of honest love and compassion, it has to be right there, in the eyes.The Dalai Lama's eyes sparkle and dance with laughter and unbridled love. The Pope's eyes are dark and glazed, bleak as obsidian marbles. Pat Robertson's eyes are rheumy and hollow, like tiny potholes of old wax. Goldman Sachs cretins, well, they don't use their own eyes at all; they just steal someone else's.
— Mark Morford
Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu."I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter."Then let's do it. That's us in spades.
— Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
Why do you work so hard to make yourself disliked? I should think you'd find it happens enough on its own without putting yourself to any extra trouble.
— Steven Brust, Tiassa
Every human personality is the product of an innate drive to create something unique from one’s raw individual experience.
— Tadahiko Nagao, Kokology: The Game of Self-Discovery
For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.
— Steve Rasnic Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
Is she always like this?" "No, usually worse.
— Steve Voake, The Web of Fire
She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.
— Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
So it seems as though this part of us that is living a life on Earth is only a small piece or splinter of a much larger us. That we are many rather than one, or rather pieces of a more complex whole. We are only able to focus on the splinter we perceive as our totality. That is a good thing, because if we were aware of the complexity of it we would not be able to function in this world or reality. We are only able to see the facade that masks a much larger picture. Only now are we being allowed to peek behind the veil.
— Dolores Cannon, The Convoluted Universe - Book One
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
How do you know when it's me?""Your footsteps are apologetic?""What does that mean?"She turned, smiling wiping her hands on her long, black skirt. "It doesn't mean anything," she said. "Everybody else here just does what they want to do and doesn't think twice about it. But you're never sure.
— Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam
How could he try to get Sandi to reveal her true colors when she was a rainbow?
— Peggy Webb, The Mona Lucy
Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics.
— Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Yuvraj Singh is one of the best batsmen to watch in world cricket when he's in form. He is ego personified. Yuvraj doesn’t just hit the ball, he lets it rebound off his aura.
— Jarrod Kimber
Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
— Walter Isaacson
Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!
— Walter Isaacson
Be Weird, at least you will have a unique Personality.
— Udayveer Singh
An excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Everything he said should be followed by a big sic
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
So I've come to the conclusion that it is thus my own fault when these people I have been talking about finally stop saying "Ah" and tell me it's a pity I always do such odd things.
— Barbara   Wright
Fritz was melancholic by nature, and could tolerate his own gloom. I do not think this is so with you, who are sanguine and impatient. In your case, remorse and despondency could be crippling.
— John Christopher, The Pool of Fire
Like everything else in the world, it is one man's work.
— Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound into speech. 
— Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore
Everyone has something of the spiti that animates the artist
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm?
— Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
And fair warning, as part of my tortured-soul thing I have to start being mean to you. Apparently that will make me seem strong and make you seem weak. Because strong nowadays means being a total dick.
— Cale Dietrich, The Love Interest
Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Talent is one thing, personality and attitude is everything!
— Lily Amis
I wanted to belong, like everyone else around me did, but there was no country I could say was mine. I had no one to tell me that many other people in the world have a fragmented identity; that it doesn’t matter. That who we are as a person is what’s important.
— Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
How can we “find ourselves” again? How can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled. If the hare has seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven skins, and not be able to say: “Here you truly are; there is skin no more.”Also this digging into oneself, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. You may easily take such hurt, that no doctor can heal you. And what is the point: since everything bears witness to our essence — our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
I do not allow anybody to hurt me without my permission, because, I believe in no expectations, no disappointments, no hurting myself, just being me and my imaginative self. Trust me because, when I have expectations, I am setting myself up for disappointment.
— Muhammad Usman Aman
Everything you do or say interests me.""Really," she said skeptically. "What about Lord Westcliff's claim that I'm shallow and self-absorbed?"As she faced him, Simon braced one hand on the wall near her head and leaned over her protectively. His voice was very soft. "He doesn't know you.""And you do?""Yes, I know you." He reached out to finger a tendril of damp hair that clung to her neck. "You guard yourself carefully. You don't like to depend on anyone. You're determined and strong-willed, and you're decided in your opinions. Not to mention stubborn. But never self-absorbed. And anyone with your intelligence could never be called shallow.
— Lisa Kleypas, Secrets of a Summer Night
We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become
— James     Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
I am the proud owner of several complexes. But who isn’t? When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?
— Gabrielle Zevin, Young Jane Young
Breaking the personality is like cutting the tree in its trunk, it needs years to be grown as it was‌.
— Kamaran Ihsan Salih
Fluttershy is a natural beauty with gentle, serene ways. Despite her shy and unassuming nature, Fluttershy has a unique gift with animals. Her sweetness and sincerity can charm every animal, from tiny woodland creatures to the most powerful of mythical beasts, making her a valuable asset to her friends in all their adventures. Although she's afraid of heights (very embarrassing for a Pegasus) and shies away at the slightest sound, Fluttershy has no problem confronting grumpy manticores or scolding greedy dragons. While she lacks confidence, she has an inner strength that comes out when others are in trouble. Fluttershy has a lot of fears to overcome, but one day her strength of character and enormous heart will make her a force to be reckoned with.
— Brandon T. Snider, The Elements of Harmony: The Official Guidebook
When her pony pals are down in the dumps, Fluttershy swoops in to cheer them up in her own sweet and quiet way. She delights in the beauty of friendship and the nice feelings that comes from being nice. Fluttershy is definitely a little bit meek, but she can be fierce when she needs to be. She's faced her fears and grown a whole bunch, and she continues to build her self-confidence! Oh, and she loves her animals. A LOT! Even when they're being naughty little critters. She's probably the most in tune with creatures of the forest of all the ponies she calls her friends.
— Brandon T. Snider, My Little Pony: The Elements of Harmony Vol. II
Who could be like him? Who could ever be like you? Each of us has his path. They run close together sometimes—for life, if we are fortunate—but they never cross.
— Harper Fox, Brothers of the Wild North Sea
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
— Oscar Wilde
You were born to be among the advisors and thinkers, the spiritual and moral leaders for your society. There is every reason for pride.
— Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
And when you finally realize you made a mistake bending to his will, changing yourself his wishes to fulfill, you will then see his ugly creation staring at your reflection and all that will be left to salvage is the carcass of your personality swarming with a plethora of worms erasing your former beautiful buried so deep, it will take a miracle to retrieve...
— Evy Michaels
Chronically awkward people can feel like everyone else received a secret instruction manual at birth titled "How to be Socially Competent." For the awkward person, this dreamy manual would provide easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions on how to gracefully navigate social life, avoid embarrassing faux pas, and rid oneself of the persistent anxiety that comes with being awkward.
— Ty Tashiro, Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome
To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.
— Kei Miller, Augustown
Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
It is who you are that matters and not how you look.
— Luffina Lourduraj
Our purpose in mortality collectively, is to pioneer godliness; with each of our unique personalities and perspectives, we are searching out the pieces of the divine puzzle. Possibly before this life is over, but certainly after, there will be a great collaboration, and we will all bring our pieces of the puzzle together that we have found. Each piece on its own is quite an odd spectacle, but together they are beautiful and amazing—the whole mystery of mortality and eternal life. ‘What pieces are you holding? What good have you found? Bring it together and we will all rejoice.
— Michael Brent Jones, Dinner Party: Part 2
Josey shook her head, thinking, if Della Lee were a candy, she would be a SweeTart. Not the hard kind that broke your teeth, the chewy kind, the kind you had to work on and mull over, your eyes watering and your lips turning up into a smile you didn't want to give.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
Enjoy being you. Have fun. And be different.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible
—  but both sides together were bewildering.
The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
State integration involves linkage in at least three different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states—the “inter” dimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual—or many other—states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy.
— Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
God created you not as an ordinary personality, but eminent, peculiar, and with a special assignment
— Sunday Adelaja
God's image has been imprinted uniquely on each of us. In God's infinite creativity there are no duplicates
—  you are the only you there has ever been or ever will be.
A person with no enemies is a person with no personality.
— Jeffrey Fry
What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.
— Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
Be faithful anywhere you find yourself
— Sunday Adelaja
Everybody has multiple personalities—at least three. We’re one person at work, another person in private, and a third person when we appear in polite society.
— Johan Fundin, Mr. Maniac
I know it must look odd, given that I didn't even know Emma. But it seems to me that almost no one really knew her. Everyone I speak to has a different version of what she was like.
— J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before
I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you'd use in a novel. I'd be careful not to use them.Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant.And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality.' Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory,suddenly I know it's nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later,she'd make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she'd be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she 'broke down,' or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this antihumanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I've known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George's over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile... I've written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I'm clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing I so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I'd never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin.And so I'll write again that George was a good man.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Being selfless isn't bad. It is a very rare quality.
— M.B. Mohan
A person’s irregular surfaces are what make us interesting.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Success lies in absorbing negative feedback and making the best use of it.
— Osama Sarwar
The perfection of yoga, therefore, does not terminate in voidness or impersonalism; on the contrary, the perfection of yoga is attained when one actually sees the Personality of Godhead in His eternal form.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
If you want to build your personality don't do extraordinarily just act like a Human being.
— mohammad rishad sakhi
Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.
— H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror
Resentment was the hinge of her personality.
— Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark
—  a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.
Personality rise as comparison dies.
— Oliver Faurholt Nielsen
As you grow wiser, so does your personality.
— Oliver Faurholt Nielsen
It is impossible to know the whole depth of someone’s character from a single moment, but seeing how they respond to the unexpected is a great start.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Loyalty
I should thank you'', she said.His lips stilled, and she felt him smile against his skin. ''For what?''''Everything, really. But mostly for being you
— Julia Quinn, Because of Miss Bridgerton
I'm a Joker. Dangerous and silly at the same time.
— Nuno Roque
Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously
— Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
If personality expresses itself by acts of discrimination, and discrimination, besides being taboo, has no material to work on, what becomes of personality? It shrinks, it atrophies, it dies.
— L.P. Hartley, Facial Justice
I don´t want to be a ghost or a stupid sexy cat. I want to be something that I really want to be.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
I might be quiet, but that doesn't mean I'm not independent.
— Sneha Ameya
I´m one of those regular weird people.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
We are each weird in a different way.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
Your money does not define your standard, your personality does.
— V.Kuotsu
Everything around us build us. Books, films, family... everything out there is building our personality!
— Deyth Banger
The most consistent thing about Graham Wessit was his attitude of open experiment. Can you even imagine , she asked herself, plain, quiet, intellectual little you spending a lifetime on the arm of such a havoc-producing man?
— Judith Ivory, Black Silk
Following a trend is useful, until you start alienating the original. The last thing we want is to live in a world where everything is the same. Originality and individuality is key.
— J.S. Strange
I say awkward things at awkward times, without feeling awkward.
— Sneha Ameya
Not what hatches out is the face to the world.
— Amit Abraham
Her hair was longer than it used to be, and it veiled her shoulders like a shawl. She used it for protection. If there was one thing Sydney knew, it was hair. She loved beauty school and loved working in the salon in Boise. Hair said more about people than they knew, and Sydney understood the language naturally.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells
I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
— Linus Torvalds
He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
He glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality.
— J.G. Farrell
Manners matter, asserts the professor. What provokes rebellion, he asserts, is not as often a theory out allowing for arbitrary power but be excessive, brusque use of it by a particular individual.
— Robert J. Allison, Before 1776: Life in the American Colonies
You're different, you know.""Only different from you," he said. "Not different from me.
— Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker
Extroverts sparkle, introverts glow. Extroverts are fireworks, introverts are a fire in the hearth.
— Sophia Dembling, Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After
It is the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine
— Imitation Game
Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity.
— Douglas Coupland
I am not afraid of anything in the world. But I'm afraid of myself, afraid of what I will be in the future.
— Luffina Lourduraj
I want to be extraordinarily ordinary. I believe that's the most extraordinary a person can possibly be.
— Zarafshan Khan
The introvert's dilemma is that we might not get a lot of invitations for the kind of socializing we like best--small, mellow gatherings. In other words, the kind of socializing other introverts like to do. Because, let's face it: We're introverts. We're all at home waiting to be invited to do introvert things. Which means, of course, that none of us are getting the invitations we crave. It's an introvert standoff.
— Sophia Dembling, Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After
I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.
— Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
With the wolves around, your humbleness is your worst adversary.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
Many a time, you may not even have to speak, however difficult the situation; your goatee speaks for you.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. she was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only - the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
— Betty  Smith
The kinds of people we meet in our life have a huge impact on the kind of person we become.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
I was as terrible at giving compliments as I was at receiving them.
— Louise Bay, Calling Me Back
Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
— Pierre Bayard
It's not whether your thoughts are in tune with the other's sensibilities or not - But are you at peace with yourself is what matters the most!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Satan will make your own principles and inclinations to betray you.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
When it comes to carving out a unique niche in the over-congested world of football ‘personalities,’ Jürgen Norbert Klopp has it down.
— Trevor Downey
There are two distinct groups of people in the world: the ones who tell stories, and those who pay attention.
— Daniel Gonçalves
He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.
— Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd
...your personality is the only permanent thing in your, ultimately, temporary life...that's all the more reason to cherish it...
— Isabella Koldras, Sense of perspective.
A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.
— Francisco Márquez Villanueva
She looked at him for a long moment. "There really is more substance to you than you let on, isn't there?£
— Jen Turano, A Most Peculiar Circumstance
If you don't love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It's not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the Divine. It must be displayed publicly.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
DON'T ASK ABOUT MY PERSONALITY BECAUSE IT'S SOUND LIKE PERSONAL
— Haseeb Fayyaz
This isn’t a duality. I’m not one of the Balfour Academy soldiers, drinking a potion to become virile, ugly, and monstrously strong. There isn’t a lever inside me that determines which of me you’re talking to at once. A knife can cut or stab. The label doesn’t change. It’s still a knife.
— Wildbow, Twig
Where there is personality, there is discord.
— Terry Pratchett
Of the classic fIve W's and an H, Amy's approach seemed to be that when you have a handle on the WHO, the rest will more or less reveal itself accordingly.
— Caitlin Keiper
A man can never have too many books. Neither can he have too many fountain pens, hats, fishing rods, waistcoats, tea caddies, paintings or whatever helps him to feel at home in his surroundings and communicate his personality to the world.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.
— Nikolai A. Berdyaev
Grandmother was like an opal. You could never be sure which colors were really there and which were just tricks of the light.
— Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen
A lot of people who are straight-shooting…they’re only happy to be so blunt when talking about others. They’re not so upfront about who they are, what flaws they have, and what their issues are.
— Suzanne Wright, Taste of Torment
Fuck your personality if your best selfie doesn't get a hundred likes on Facebook.
— Himanshu Rajput
A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...
— Marcel Proust
If your dog, your best friend turns on you, take a good look at yourself. You may have a serious personality disorder.
— Will Leamon
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence...
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
How come you're so different, I asked once, as we sat in the shade of the pine tree. Yukiko's answer, a sentence learned by heart: Because I fell from a star.
— Milena Michiko Flašar, I Called Him Necktie
People tend to be more tofu-like, able to absorb whatever environment they're dropped into. But where does the adaptability end and your actual personality begin?
— Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number
I might be a freak, but I preferred to keep that part of my personality private.
— Tara Spears, The Darker Side of Trey Grey
I, Lexi Anderson, am proud to say that I do, indeed, have a great personality.And it's only a matter of time before the Beautiful People will be wishing they had great personalities, too.Good luck with that, oh Beautiful Ones.Because we Great Girls are the rarest breed.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality
I don't blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do."(...) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (...) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (...) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was - and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things - that made him what he was. (...) You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Chemically, I'm as off as I can be. But you fix me.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
Dissociative parts of the personality are not actually separate identities or personalities in one body, but rather parts of a single individual that are not yet functioning together in a smooth, coordinated, flexible way. P14
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back.They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.
— Victor Hugo
Love her personality.. Not her body!And all i meant.. Don't u ever choose her body over her personality.. Cause if u did this u will eventually find someone with a great body then her's..
— Eyad Ayman Kaifi
The personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which seldom knows its defeat.
— Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes
Copy everything you see on television, from hair styles to the clothes and don't think too often, just do exactly how you were told, how your parents told you, and you will make your own personality that is you.
— Auliq Ice
You need to stop caring what people who don't matter think of you. Be who you are and let everybody else be who they are. Differences are a good thing.
— Holly Smale, Geek Girl
...Our stories are drive by who we are and what we do, and not by the events that happens to us.
— Holly Smale, Geek Girl
I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories: Volume 1