Biologically Based Quotes & Sayings

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are. — Rachel Joyce

We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements. — Tony Fadell

I want to mark you, and I want to own you. I want to fucking live inside you. — Annabel Joseph

I raised my hand to hit her. She didn't flinch only stared into my eyes like I dare you to. I never physically abused Veronica but she knew how to take me there. Watching the arrogant smile spread across her face, pissed me off. — K.C. Blaze

Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of 'character;' and those of 'temperament.' Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family's interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a living and relax: innumerable cultural forces build your unique set of character traits. The balance of your personality is your temperament, all the biologically based tendencies that contribute to your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, put it, 'I am, plus my circumstances.' Temperament is the 'I am,' the foundation of who you are. — Helen Fisher

But if you could for a time wipe out all the poets and all their poetry from the world, then you would soon discover, by their very absence, where the men of action got their energy from, and who really supplied the life-sap to their harvest-field. It is not those who have plunged deep down into the Pundit's Ocean of Renunciation, nor those who are always clinging to their possessions; it is not those who have become adepts in turning out quantities of work, nor those who are ever telling the dry beads of duty,--it is not these who win at last. But it is those who love, because they live. These truly win, for they truly surrender. They accept pain with all their strength and with all their strength they remove pain. It is they who create, because they know the secret of true joy, which is the secret of detachment. — Rabindranath Tagore

If women take their bodies seriously and ideally we should then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women's interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled "equality" with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based "superior" wisdom. — Phyllis Chesler

You're the one with the badge," I admitted, "but I'm the one being haunted by a seven-year-old in a ballerina costume. — Linda Lael Miller

I like change. I don't like being in the same room for too long. — Michael Mann

Psychologists often discuss the difference between "temperament" and "personality." Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. — Susan Cain

Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles. — Bell Hooks

Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality. — Sabina Magliocco

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way. — Ayana Mathis

STOP!' Keefe held up his hands. 'Ground rules for this conversation: All talk of alicorn baby-making is off the table
got it? Otherwise I'll have to rip my ears off. — Shannon Messenger

The all of God, the totality of His immensity, is known in the human heart through encountering divine mercy. The search for the Lord within is the effort to find those places in the substance of the soul where God's mercy and human misery touch each other, where one has bearing on the other. — Anthony Lilles

A friend is someone you can call in the middle of the night when your man is gone, or you wish he would go, or you suspect your cellulite is winning - or even just to prove to yourself that there is someone you can call in the middle of the night. — Anne Beatts

Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. — Susan Cain

The cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies toward goodness ... are as innate as our tendencies toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both. — Warder Clyde Allee

Love-based parenting elevates the importance of the relationship to the highest position. No homework assignment, no chore, and no social etiquette is ever more important than the parent-child relationship. Maintaining connectedness and attunement, thereby sustaining the balance of love of self and love of child, is the primal outcome of every interaction the parent has with the child. When this is achieved, the other less significant items will take care of themselves. The ultimate challenge in reaching this goal is that children both want and need autonomy (independence), yet they are biologically engineered to be in relationships and to belong (dependence). This clash between the two is compounded by American culture where there is a powerful emphasis on the individual rather than — Heather T. Forbes

We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did — Michel De Montaigne

We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here. — Corrie Ten Boom