Quotes about Personality

The journey to wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly, and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, and how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond, so that you can experience consciously the nature of your personality, face what it has produced in your life, and choose to change that. Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.

I enjoy spending my free time indulging in hours of deep introspection. I am greatly intrigued by the "self" and it's lifelong development. When I'm not analyzing myself, I am trying to figure you out. We are products of our environment and my diverse experiences have developed a truly unique personality which I embrace. I speak without subtlety or evasion and sometimes I'm too sarcastic.Some people may dislike me upon first impression because I'm hard to read. Once you learn, the effects become addictive. I live my life trying to be a good person and attempt to draw bold lines between right and wrong. I am far from being who I ultimately wish to become but I take strides forward daily. The goals that I set as a child are the same goals that drive my life.

Everybody needs positive messages, and no living creature possessing a personality can escape this fact any more than a sentient being living in a human body can deny that body's need for physical food.

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. 

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

It is not what happens to you or for you that makes you grateful. It's how you respond to what is happening, that shows your belief about gratitude

Someone who has reduced his mind and life and soul and personality to meager or minor things -- someone marked by "mikropsychia" or in Latin "pusillanimitas" -- has a petty-souled outlook on life that no one but him ingrained in him. It is not great wealth or great power that makes a man "great," but "makropsychia" or "magnanimitas," great-souledness, a distinctively aristic virtue, a primal determination to rupture the finite and reductivist structures that habits and mechanical intellect tend to erect in our lives. The lust of most people to live in a trivialized and finitized or ordinarized world is patent; it is a way of achieving security, making oneself safe from threats, challenges, criticisms. And the lust of aristoi to live in a world of greatness, of monumental issues and questions that are made of the kind of bronze that will endure for ages to come, that is also patent: it is a way for capacious souls to furnish their minds with just the right scale or magnitude of challenges, of intellectual and moral instruments with the right heft for their wills to wield.

The quality of an individual is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

My Soul’s Marriage

A commitment to your own and
the world’s transformation.

For the Benefit of myself and All Beings.

I,            (my ego & personality)

Do solemnly swear
to love, honor and obey my soul,
my path to realization  and
relationship with a higher,
deeper creative power,
for better or worse,
for richer or poorer,
in sickness and in health,
from now and forever more.

One interesting thing I did was to predict people's Myers-Briggs type, if they didn't already know it. It was pretty interesting that nearly 100 percent of the successful goal-free people were Extroverted-Intuiter-Perceivers.

The people who were goal-free but not successful tend to be introverts. If you're not going to get out there and play big, and meet people and have fun, and really go full-out with passion and gusto, it's hard for you to allow things to come together in a synchronistic way. But the Judgers out there love their goals.

We should take care not to make intellect our god.  It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.  It cannot lead, it can only serve.

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

It's useful to look at [thought] as a system of reflexes.  A reflex just operates, as we've seen in the case of the knee-jerk.  However, we don't usually think that thought is like the knee-jerk reflex.  We think we are controlling thought and producing thought.  That way of thinking is part of our whole background.  But I'm suggesting that it's not generally so--that a vast part of our thought just comes out from the reflex system.  You only find out what the thought is after it comes out.  Now, this really overturns a great deal of the way we look at the mind or the personality or our entire cultural background.

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. 

The only kind of person I would like to be is the kind of person who likes to be me.

"The person you were last year does not exist. Personality is a flowing, changing complex of interrelated factors. You are not the same person you were yesterday."

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. . . The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings.  The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.

How do you know how to be perfect? You do not know how to be perfect; you learn how to be perfect. It is the spiritual work that one does daily which awakens your world on the path to perfection. The world begins to reflect how to be perfect by experiences and actions, going on and around you all the time. These are the things that cannot be taught in books, as there are too many variances in behaviour and personality. The tough lessons of love and friendship happen throughout our own lives and we must seek to find the lessons of life hidden deep within all interactions.

You are here to create reality, not to continue status quo. You are here to grow in knowledge, philosophy, and then in truth.  You are here to live, and not be afraid of life. You are here to use your brain to create thoughts and to conquer your ignorance.

What happens when a person becomes enlightened? They conquer their ignorance. What does that mean?

That means they develop their Spirit rather than their altered ego, their personality, their body. And they work everyday in embodiment of that (spirit) energy. They don’t ever really grow old. They have dynamic energy.

They can create and their level of acceptance is extraordinary.

Existence has no personality.
No question of personalities, it simply is whatsoever it is.
To experience existence as it is, is to know the truth.

Personality as such is false. The word "personality" has to be understood. It comes from persona; persona means mask. In ancient drama the actors used to wear masks. Those masks were called personae - personae because the sound was coming from behind the mask. Sona means sound. The masks were apparent to the audience and from behind the mask the sound was coming. From that word persona has come the word "personality."

All personality is false. Good personality, bad personality, the personality of a sinner and the personality of a saint - all are false. You can wear a beautiful mask or an ugly mask, it doesn't make a difference.

The real thing is your essence.

Personality is also a necessary part of growth. It is like if you catch hold of a fish in the sea and you throw it on the shore; the fish jumps back into the sea. Now for the first time it will know that it has always lived in the sea; for the first time it will know that, "The sea is my life." Up to now, before it was caught and thrown on the shore, it may not ever have thought of the sea at all; it may have been utterly oblivious of the sea. To know something, first you have to lose it.

To be aware of paradise, first you have to lose it. Unless it is lost and regained you will not understand the beauty of it.

Always be a first rate version of yourself, instead of a second rate version of somebody else.

A virtuous man or woman who is determined to develop the Supreme Enlightened Mind, should thus develop it: I have to lead all living beings to put a stop to (reincarnation) and escape (suffering), and when they have been so led, not one of them in fact stops (reincarnating) or escapes suffering. Why? Because, if a Bodhisattva believes in the notion of an ego, a personality, or a living being, he is not a true Bodhisattva.

The giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole life styles...these are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure - all your life.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.