Top 100 Characteristic Quotes
#1. Her optimism flew high, not only for her eventual cure of which she was sure, but for everything that would happen to her henceforth. That too, she knew was a characteristic of the tubercular - the very quality , in fact, which made them such interesting patients.
Kathryn Hulme
#2. The rupture between faith and knowledge is a symptom of the split consciousness which is so characteristic of the mental disorder of our day.
C. G. Jung
#3. He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him
of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit.
Robert Musil
#5. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#6. 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
#7. Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
Clay Shirky
#8. It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#9. The witnessing force behind mind, that characteristic self or spirit is called atman; the God in you.
Gian Kumar
#10. War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
Jane Goodall
#11. The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.
John Maynard Keynes
#12. It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.
Terry Pratchett
#13. Both Newton and Darwin were driven by the data and were forced to recognize that they couldn't explain everything. It may be a characteristic of great scientists to know what to accept and what to leave out.
Lewis Wolpert
#14. Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war.
Pierre Curie
#15. In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture's own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#16. Always think about the needs of others because being a part of a group is
an essential characteristic of human nature.
Eraldo Banovac
#17. The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created
Walter Bagehot
#18. Our only consolation, as we feel our own strength failing us, is to feel that we may help those who come after us to do more and to do better than ourselves, fixing their eyes as they can on the great horizons of which we only had a glimpse," pronounced Pasteur, with characteristic gallantry. Many
Bill Wasik
#19. If there is one characteristic more than others that contemporary public worship needs to recapture it is this awe before the surpassingly great and gracious God.
Henry Sloane Coffin
#21. It is only obvious that teaching is a very special art, sharing withonly two other arts-argriculture and medicin-an exceptionally important characteristic.
Mortimer J. Adler
#22. There is not a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
Mark Twain
#23. A characteristic of the flesh is its fickleness: it alternates between Yes and No and vice versa. But the will of God is: "Walk not according to the flesh (not even for a moment) but according to the Spirit."
Watchman Nee
#24. Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter half of the 19th Century is its SPEED
William Rathbone Greg
#25. The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.
Robert J. Shiller
#26. 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
#27. Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.
Bruno Schulz
#28. The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
Laurie Anderson
#29. Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.
E.M. Delafield
#30. In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael.
James Agate
#31. Of Captain Elliot, already so well known to the government, it would be almost superfluous to speak; in this action, he evinced his characteristic bravery and judgment; and, since the close of the action, has given me the most able and essential assistance.
Oliver Hazard Perry
#32. Freeman Dyson said: "It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#33. All men lie. That's how they operate. if you want a longterm relationship with a man you've got to understand it's going to be with a liar. It's in their nature - it's genetic, it's a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.
Peter James
#34. An important characteristic of calm abiding meditation is to let go of any goal and simply sit for the sake of sitting. We breathe in and out, and we just watch that. Nothing else.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche
#35. As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. This acceptance of necessary expediency leads to the increasing doubt and anxiety characteristic of the last hours before the first significant encounter with reality: the separation event.
Venkatesh G. Rao
#36. [ ... ] while I felt that the Marxist attitude towards their theory was not at all admirable but was typically dogmatic and had all these properties which the Marxists usually said were characteristic of the churches. So I realized fairly early that Marxism was more of a church than of a science.
Karl Popper
#37. The way of a creative mind is always positive, it always asserts; it does not know the doubts which are so characteristic of the scientific mind.
Naum Gabo
#38. It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.
Peter Ackroyd
#39. Foresight has been a distinguishing characteristic of all truly great political, religious, and social betterment leaders.
John Mott
#40. The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.
Emil Cioran
#41. Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge
Erich Fromm
#42. All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#43. Passion is not a quality that is foreign to you. It is not a characteristic that some people are born with and some must do without. To be passionate is as natural to you as breathing, as natural as being alive. It is the source of who you are.
Barbara De Angelis
#44. For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.
Christopher Ricks
#45. It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.
George Santayana
#46. The strongest distinguishing characteristic of humans is their power of denial.
Deborah Harkness
#47. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of a superhero is a willingness to sacrifice for the good of others, even to the point of laying down his or her own life.
Rachel Hawkins
#49. The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.
Ludwig Von Mises
#50. This is not drawing,' he cried, 'this is inspiration!' 'I had meant it to be drawing,' was Constable's characteristic answer.
Aldous Huxley
#51. A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature
George Orwell
#52. Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.
John Forbes Nash
#53. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.
Frank O'Connor
#54. A characteristic of intuitive solutions and new ideas is that of being obvious once they are discovered.
Edward De Bono
#55. If I had to name the single characteristic shared by all truly successful individuals, I'd say it's the ability to create and nurture a network of contacts.
Harvey MacKay
#56. Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
David G. Hartwell
#57. To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'
Viktor E. Frankl
#58. When I am no longer being copied, I shall know that I am a back number ... the fear of being copied is often the characteristic of the meager imagination.
Elsie De Wolfe
#59. 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
#60. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.
Robert A. Heinlein
#61. A shared characteristic in each of these translations is that ea is an active state of being. Like breathing, ea cannot be achieved or possessed; it requires constant action day after day, generation after generation. Unlike
Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua
#63. Everything that is full of life loves change,
for the characteristic of life is movement toward a new goal and urges toward new pleasures
Fulton J. Sheen
#64. I don't think that modesty is the outstanding characteristic of contemporary politics, do you?
Edward Heath
#65. The only characteristic all airliners share is that upon proper urging they are normally capable of leaving the earth's surface.
Ernest K. Gann
#66. This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner "I" is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude.
Thomas Merton
#67. May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants, which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet, which is noticeable by the naked eye, and which led the ancients to personify it as a warrior?
Camille Flammarion
#68. Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#69. Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.
Franklin Foer
#70. The worst deformities, the foulest stains, disfiguring and blackening all the rest, are the very parts of Fijian nature which, while the most strongly characteristic, are such that may only be hurriedly mentioned, dimly hinted at, or passed by altogether in silence.
James Calvert
#71. The diversity of institutions has made possible the combination of government ownership and private enterprise which has been a further characteristic of Canadian development. Canada has remained fundamentally a product of Europe.
Harold Innis
#72. Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else.
M.F.K. Fisher
#73. The use of proverbs is characteristic of an unlettered people. They are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.
John Hay
#74. Humility is the key characteristic of a worship leader. Actually, the key for any great leader.
Chris Tomlin
#75. One characteristic that I have observed about the timing of all good traders is that they never try to squeeze out the last point in a stock.
Venita VanCaspel
#76. Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.
Martin Amis
#77. The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights ...
Ayn Rand
#78. Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so.
Theodore Roosevelt
#79. Always have passion on what you do for your entire life. This would characteristic would help you to overcome very difficult situations.
Saaif Alam
#80. Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.
Theodore Dalrymple
#81. A further, albeit more complex, possibility is that our conscious selves might suffer from characteristic uncertainty about our true values, and gather information about them from choices we make (the Jamesian: "How do I know what I like until I see what I pick").
Tali Sharot
#82. A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.
Joan Robinson
#83. Edward Smith: What do you think is the characteristic of a really nice person? Some people you obviously do like more than others.
Andy Warhol: Ummm, well, if they talk a lot.
ES: What, and don't make you talk?
AW: Yeah, yes, that's a really nice person.
Andy Warhol
#84. That spirit of mockery characteristic of the guaracha was part of the mambo from the beginning.
Ned Sublette
#85. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing
Paul Kalanithi
#86. Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is on the most important characteristic, which is trust.
Howard Schultz
#87. The characteristic place to find Christians is among their enemies. The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.
William Stringfellow
#88. On the contrary, the characteristic element of the present situation is that economic questions have finally and irrevocably invaded the domain of public life and politics.
Arthur Henderson
#89. One charming characteristic of many flank attacks I could mention is that they do not very often lead to simplification: if the attack is parried, there usually are still opportunities left for initiating action in another sector.
Bent Larsen
#90. The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiased by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.
Karl Pearson
#91. Characteristic he considered diagnostic of the true dragon. All such Species could expel something additional with their breath, whether it was the legendary fire or otherwise.
Marie Brennan
#92. You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.
Gene Wolfe
#93. This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
Martin Heidegger
#94. The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.
Charles Frazier
#95. I can keep learning about all the different technologies. It's my most telling characteristic. I'm interested in trying anything new.
Martha Stewart
#96. It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification.
Michio Kaku
#97. If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
#98. In a government whose distinguishing characteristic should be a diffusion and equalization of its benefits and burdens the advantage of individuals will be augmented at the expense of the community at large.
Martin Van Buren
#99. A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.
Noam Chomsky
#100. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.
Lord Chesterfield
