Characteristics Quotes - Page 34

• One principal characteristic of vice in the present age is the contempt of fame.

  Thomas Gray

  Age, Vices, Fame

  Thomas Gray, John MITFORD (Vicar of Benhall.) (1866). “The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray. [With “The Life of Thomas Gray. By John Mitford”.]”, p.152

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• This is a speculating and selfish age; and to think 'money will answer all things,' is too much the characteristic of Americans.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Money, Selfish, Thinking

  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1835). “Traits of American Life”, p.239

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• Why is it that water, so monotonous in its characteristics, should nevertheless possess a charm for every mind? I believe it is chiefly because it bears the impress of the Creator, which we feel neither the power of time or of man can efface or alter.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Believe, Men, Water

  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1835). “Traits of American Life”, p.195

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• What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.

  William Matthews

  Song, Reflection, Ideas

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• If it be the characteristic of a worldly man that he desecrates what is holy, it should be of the Christian to consecrate what is secular, and to recognize a present and presiding divinity in all things.

  Thomas Chalmers

  Christian, Men, Divinity

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• ... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

  Edith Hamilton

  Thinking, People, Literature

  Edith Hamilton (1964). “The Ever-Present Past”

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• It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring. It is characteristic of genius to break up the artificial arrangements of conventionalism, and to view mankind in true perspective, in their gradations of inherent rather than of adventitious worth. Genius is therefore essentially democratic, and has always been so.

  Harriet Martineau

  Views, Perspective, Hopeful

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.14

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• Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

  Jane Goodall

  Exercise, Self, Giving

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• Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Change, Entertainment, Positive Experiences

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

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• My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.

  Renata Adler

  Uncles, Cancer, Grandmother

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.62, New York Review of Books

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• It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Progress, Age, Doe

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• Even sleep is characteristic. How beautiful are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming features! and how painful and anxious is the sleep of the guilty!

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Beautiful, Children, Sleep

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• the term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Sex, Men, Individual

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1974). “Toward a recognition of androgyny”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.

  Oswald Spengler

  Men, Cities, Lasts

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1961). “The Decline of the West...: Perspectives of world-history”

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• nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day.

  Gerda Lerner

  Attitude, Nursing, Nurse

  Gerda Lerner (2014). “The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History”, p.16, UNC Press Books

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• Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

  Shirley Hazzard

  Commitment, Numbers, Forgiving

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “The Evening of the Holiday: A Novel”, p.114, Macmillan

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• Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Passion, Thinking, People

  Marguerite Yourcenar, Matthieu Galey (1984). “With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey”, Boston : Beacon Press

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• the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

  Margaret Halsey

  Competition, Quality, Clock

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• the American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings. ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially.

  Margaret Halsey

  Jobs, Creative, Ruins

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

  Margaret Halsey

  People, Growth, Doe

  Margaret Halsey (1977). “No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a Wasp”, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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• A tendency to resume the same mode of action at stated times is peculiarly the characteristic of the nervous system; and on this account regularity is of great consequence in exercising the moral and intellectual power. All nervous diseases have a marked tendency to observe regular periods; and the natural inclination to sleep at the approach of night is another instance of the same fact.

  George Combe

  Sleep, Exercise, Night

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• One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of "Scholasticism," that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.

  Pierre Hadot

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Views

  "Philosophy as a Way of Life". Book by Pierre Hadot, trans. Michael Chase, p. 270, 1995.

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• The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

  Carl Jung

  Children, Play, Imagination

  Carl Jung (2016). “Psychological Types”, p.88, Routledge

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• Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Thinking, Self

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.277, Simon and Schuster

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• As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.

  Walt Whitman

  Fall, America, Yellowstone

  Walt Whitman (2012). “Specimen Days & Collect”, p.150, Courier Corporation

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