Temperament Quotes - Page 11

• Nowadays grandmasters no longer study their opponent's games so much, but they study his character, his behaviour and his temperament in the most thorough fashion.

  David Bronstein

  Fashion, Character, Games

  David Bronstein (1991). “200 Open Games”, p.97, Courier Corporation

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• Anyone can revolt. It is more difficult silently to obey our own inner promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperament and our gifts.

  Georges Rouault

  Mean, Expression, Sincere

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• Leaders are problem solvers by talent and temperament, and by choice. For them, the new information environment-undermining old means of control, opening up old closets of secrecy, reducing the relevance of ownership, early arrival, and location-should seem less a litany of problems than an agenda for action. Reaching for a way to describe the entrepreneurial energy of his fabled editor Harold Ross, James Thurber said" 'He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.' That's the appropriate posture for a knowledge executive.

  Harlan Cleveland

  Mean, Opening Up, Editors

  Harlan Cleveland (1985). “The knowledge executive: leadership in an information society”, E P Dutton

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• By my makeup and temperament I wasn't really prey to physical desires. Everything happened in my head.

  Anne Desclos

  Makeup, Desire, Kinky

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• The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

  Carl Sagan

  Errors, Inability, Trial And Error

  "Cosmos".

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• A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.

  Timothy Keller

  Common Vision, People, Different

  Timothy Keller (2011). “The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God”, p.73, Penguin

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• Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

  Emile Zola

  Art, Creation, Corners

  My Hates (1866)

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• It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Zest, Three, Feminine

  W. Somerset Maugham (2012). “The Moon and Sixpence”, p.36, Courier Corporation

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• I think it is one of the most extraordinary elections, a turning point for our country and for the world. That remarkable young man [Barack Obama] has kept his demeanor, kept his temperament and has shown a power to inspire. I see what energy that he has inspired among the young. Well, it inspires us old goats too.

  David McCullough

  Country, Men, Thinking

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• The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

  Julian Barnes

  Historical, Littles, Moments

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• Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

  Steven Pinker

  Ambition, Unique, Opportunity

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• Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

  Victor Hugo

  Grief, Plunge, Cosette

  Victor Hugo (1987). “Les Misérables”, Signet Classics

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• How much do you love me?' and "Who's in charge?" ....these two questions of LOVE and CONTROL undo us ALL, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering. People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most appropriate -- and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  War, Grief, Ocean

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• But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

  James A. Baldwin

  Grief, Keys, Punishment

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• I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion." They were full of phrases like "radical humility" and "quiet fortitude.

  Susan Cain

  Sweet, Humility, Two

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.2, Broadway Books

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• He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

  Julian Barnes

  Opposites, Common Sense, Decision

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• A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Character, Men, Principles

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.209, Courier Corporation

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• Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle. Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.

  Albert Einstein

  Food, Vegetarian Diet, Vegetarianism

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.453, Princeton University Press

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• Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Pain, Real, Thinking

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• With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

  Oscar Wilde

  Strong, Passion, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.219, Diversion Books

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• Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but . . . also betrays his heart rate, his breathing.

  Sijie Dai

  Heart, Character, Artist

  Dai Sijie (2009). “Once on a Moonless Night”, p.17, Random House

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• Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.

  Susan Cain

  Personality, Brain, Important

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• There is no such thing as a perfectly happy or perfectly unhappy man in the world. One has more happiness in his life and another more unhappiness, and the same circumstance may produce widely different effects on individuals of different temperaments.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Men, Unhappy, Different

  Giacomo Casanova (2013). “The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt: Complete”, p.2362, Simon and Schuster

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• Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Naps, Weather, Had Enough

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making”, p.104, Macmillan

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• The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Family, Mother, Children

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