Top 100 Characteristic Quotes
#1. By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#2. It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
Freeman Dyson
#3. Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.
Charles Dudley Warner
#4. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.
Oscar Wilde
#5. The truth is, however, that every religion form is superior to the others in a particular respect, and it is this characteristic that in fact indicates the sufficient reason for the existence of that form.
Frithjof Schuon
#6. And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by 'love.' While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin's characteristic is the desire to get; love's characteristic is the desire to give.
John R.W. Stott
#7. It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one.
Angela Carter
#8. The sonnet has been the one distinctive characteristic of love present throughout the years.
James Marquess
#9. If you have the character to hang in there when its tough, you will develop or acquire every other characteristic necessary to WIN in the game of life.
Zig Ziglar
#10. With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed
house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of
Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable
towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them.
Susanna Clarke
#11. A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
Tom Glazer
#12. Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Alan Dundes
#13. And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic.
Thomas Hardy
#14. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
#15. After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.
Harry G. Frankfurt
#16. I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.
Ayelet Waldman
#17. [R]ights do not belong to men simply as men, but because of the superior qualities, physical, intellectual, moral or political, which are characteristic of certain individuals or races.
Charles Edward Merriam
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Muriel Rukeyser
#21. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
Agnes Repplier
#22. But the characteristic that is truly special about our species ... [is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme ...
Arthur C. Clarke
#23. The characteristic of a well-bred man is, to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect and with ease.
Doug Stanhope
#24. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#25. Characteristic of the overall difference between Boston and New York, the population at the Acropolis was far less forlorn. Its customers were just those who, for whatever reason, wanted to eat coffee-shop food at very strange hours.
Whit Stillman
#26. All living things must grow or they will die. Adaptation to change is a characteristic of all living systems. Thus, all living things must grow, adapt, evolve, or die. Evolution is nature's creative way of pushing living organisms to higher degrees of complexity. We adapt up, not compromise down.
Alvin Conway
#27. The spirit of faith is an inherent characteristic of any person that God is going to use.
Sunday Adelaja
#28. All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#30. The leading characteristic of the savage state is its refusal or avoidance of industry.
Arthur Brisbane
#31. Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him.
Omar Nelson Bradley
#32. High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.
Anthony Giddens
#33. The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.
George Henry Lewes
#34. as might have been expected, in the dinner-jacket he had worn on the previous evening. His explanation was characteristic. 'Most extraordinary,' he said, in his slightly high-pitched voice.
Margery Allingham
#35. Weakness is not a characteristic you want to share with the world
Jen Calonita
#36. The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.
Ludwig Von Mises
#37. If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven.
Malcolm Bradbury
#38. That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity - that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
#39. You've no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it's taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it's the defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on.
Peter F. Hamilton
#40. It is characteristic to believe that those in need are given to, that the squeaky hinge is the one that gets the oil, but in the realm of emotions this is not so. It is the person who does not solicit liking and love, admiration and respect, sympathy and empathy to whom they are freely given.
Jo Coudert
#41. The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer
Sol Stein
#42. Being passionate about something is the most beautiful characteristic you can develop.
Charlotte Eriksson
#43. We must recognize the chief characteristic of the modern era - a permanent state of what I call violent peace.
James D. Watkins
#44. 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
#45. Yellow is the brightest and lightest of all colors, and this brilliance is its most noticeable characteristic, which accounts for the way it is used practically and thought of symbolically.
Michael Freeman
#47. All art has this characteristic-it unites people.
Leo Tolstoy
#48. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Thomas Carlyle
#49. Scarcely have I ever heard or read the introductory phrase, "I may say without vanity," but some striking and characteristic instance of vanity has immediately followed.
Benjamin Franklin
#50. The assumption that the square of a unit vector
is positive unity leads to an algebra whose characteristic
quantities are non-associative.
Cargill Gilston Knott
#51. The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Emil Cioran
#52. Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who ... has constraints to heterosexual marriage, even a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.
Kathy Acker
#53. The number one characteristic of an alpha male is the smile," he said, beaming an artificial beam. "Smile when you enter a room. As soon as you walk in a club, the game is on. And by smiling, you look like you're together, you're fun, and you're somebody.
Neil Strauss
#54. According to my experience, the principal characteristic of genuine happiness is peace: inner peace.
Dalai Lama XIV
#55. A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.
John Ruskin
#56. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.
George Orwell
#57. One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.
Margaret Mead
#58. The great, God-blessed churches in the world today have one common characteristic: an insistence upon an exposition of God's infallible Word.
O. S. Hawkins
#59. Government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.
Robert A. Heinlein
#60. Procrastination in the beginning and precipitation towards the conclusion is the characteristic of such bodies.
James Madison
#61. The heathen mythology not only was not true, but was not even supported as true; it not only deserved no faith, but it demanded none. The very pretension to truth, the very demand of faith, were characteristic distinctions of Christianity.
Richard Whately
#62. The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.
Milan Kundera
#64. A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.
Jimmy Carter
#65. The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. The attributes of the first, or elementary, characteristic are to nourish and protect, to give warmth and security. The second, or transformative, characteristic is defined by the dynamic element of nature, which has an inherent urge toward growth and transformation.
Massimilla Harris
#67. One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Elizabeth Blackburn
#68. Heredity, to our understanding is not capable of giving to this illness (paraphilia) its characteristic form ... Heredity invents nothing, creates nothing anew; it has no imagination.
Alfred Binet
#69. Tal accepted absolutely all the world champion's conditions with a smile, taking away a very important psychological trump card from him - the harsh, prickly relations with his opponent that were characteristic of all Botvinnik's matches.
Gennadi Sosonko
#70. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Rollo May
#71. I'm a typically lazy person. It is sort of characteristic of actors.
Liev Schreiber
#72. Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
Neil Postman
#73. Benevolence is the characteristic element of humanity.
Confucius
#74. 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
#75. Persistence is a characteristic to which success invariably surrenders.
Catherine Ponder
#76. but its most important characteristic was an ability to analyze the emotional beats of a movie without any of its members themselves getting emotional or defensive.
Ed Catmull
#77. The reader will pardon us another little digression; foreign to the object of this book but characteristic and useful ...
Victor Hugo
#78. The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends ... the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.
Kenneth Burke
#80. The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#81. The [chief] characteristic of Hitler's leadership [was] his over-estimation of the power of the will. [To win the war] this will had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier.
Erich Von Manstein
#82. He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.
Vasily Grossman
#83. Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity.
Margaret J. Wheatley
#84. The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.
Thomas Merton
#86. The devil's characteristic has been to originate sin and tempt others to sin
Wayne Grudem
#87. The characteristic of the new birth is that I yield myself so completely to God that Christ is formed in me.
Oswald Chambers
#88. There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#89. Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
William Deresiewicz
#90. There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.
Paul Vitz
#91. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#92. While it is relatively easy to recognize the perennial grasses and seed-eating sparrows as characteristic of meadows, the ecosystems exist in their fullest sense underground. What we see aboveground is only the outer margin of an ecosystem that explodes in intricacy and life below.
Amy Seidl
#93. The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.
Jerome Bruner
#94. If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.
Albert Bandura
#95. The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems - on assemblages of people or technologies or both - and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.
Atul Gawande
#97. Unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right
Oswald Spengler
#98. Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational
Margaret Maclure
#99. Certain characteristic properties of elements can be foretold from their atomic weights.
Dmitri Mendeleev
#100. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
William Hazlitt
