Temperament Quotes - Page 18

• Courage is the ability to conquer fear or despair, to be brave or have a quality of mind or temperament that enables you to stand fast in the face of opposition, hardship or danger.

  Jo Baer

  Courage, Brave, Mind

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• The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Fire, Framed, Contemplation

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beauty, Real, Sunset

  Oscar Wilde, Isobel Murray (2008). “Oscar Wilde - The Major Works”, p.233, Oxford University Press

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• My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.

  Robert Silverberg

  Self, Promotion, Well Being

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• It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Mother, Horse

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• We should cultivate the optimistic temperament, and endeavour to see the good that dwells in everything. If we sit down and lament over the imperfection of our bodies and our minds, we profit nothing; it is the heroic endeavour to subdue adverse circumstances that carries our spirit upward.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Optimistic, Optimism, Imperfection

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1595, Manonmani Publishers

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• Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

  Hisham Matar

  Dream, Memories, Struggle

  "The Consequences of Dreams" by Hisham Matar, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2014.

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• The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes.

  William Wilson

  Distance, Mean, Garden

  William S. Wilson (2002). “Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka”, p.110, University of Alabama Press

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• Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind that Al Capone had. Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what 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

  Humility, People, Mind

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• Compulsory sports for those who by temperament or physique do not qualify may be a disaster. . . . The repercussions may be extreme . . . and they may be very long-lasting, even throughout adulthood.

  John Money

  Sports, Long, May

  John Money (1994). “Reinterpreting the Unspeakable: Human Sexuality 2000: The Complete Interviewer and Clinical Biographer, Exigency Theory, and Sexology for the Third Millennium”, Burns & Oates

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• If I wasn't a model I would have liked to be a gardener. It is still a puzzle to me that I ever became a model. I am an extremely private person and I do not have the temperament for fame. I think I was rather ashamed of this trivial way of earning a living.

  Jean Shrimpton

  Thinking, Way, Earning

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• An athlete and actor are really two different temperaments, night and day. As an athlete you really keep things out and as an actor you really bring things in.

  Carl Lewis

  Athlete, Night, Two

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• A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

  Marcel Proust

  Heart, Opposites, Type

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1182, Delphi Classics

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• I wasn't really a performer by temperament.

  Tom Lehrer

  Performers

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• I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

  Christopher Lasch

  Sake, Despise, Clinging

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• I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Bipolar, Optimist

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.309, Vintage

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• When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.

  William James

  Bipolar, Genius, Kind

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.29, Library of America

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• Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.

  Murray Rothbard

  Mean, Race, Self

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• I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

  Michael Haneke

  Melancholy, Tendencies, Feels

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• But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

  Mark Steyn

  Reality, Government, Lines

  Mark Steyn (2014). “The Undocumented Mark Steyn”, p.370, Regnery Publishing

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• I think we judge talent wrong. What do we see as talent? I think I have made the same mistake myself. We judge talent by people's ability to strike a cricket ball. The sweetness, the timing. That's the only thing we see as talent. Things like determination, courage, discipline, temperament, these are also talent.

  Rahul Dravid

  Determination, Mistake, Thinking

  "'I May Have Thought Too Much About the Game but That's Who I Was'". www.espncricinfo.com. July 9, 2012.

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• Too much attention and hoopla doesn't agree with my temperament.

  Neil Peart

  Attention, Too Much, Agree

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• Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Men, Essentials, Aspect

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I guess a certain amount of temperament is expected of Chess geniuses

  Ronald Gross

  Genius, Chess, Certain

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• Teaching high school, in addition to knowing one's subject matter thoroughly and being able to convey it to others, requires the grit of a long-distance runner, the stamina of a boxer going 15 rounds, the temperament of a juggler and the street smarts of a three-card monte dealer.

  Larry Cuban

  Smart, Teaching, School

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