Quotes & Sayings About Personality Theory

According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits - introversion, for example - but we can and do act out of character in the service of "core personal projects."
In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter's school. It explains how it's possible for an extroverted scientist to behave with reserve in her laboratory, for an agreeable person to act hard-nosed during a business negotiation, and for a cantankerous uncle to treat his niece tenderly when he takes her out for ice cream. — Susan Cain

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements. — Kenneth Clark

It's just a theory really, but I have always thought that your physical surroundings can shape your voice and personality. — K.d. Lang

Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them. — Gordon W. Allport

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important
historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of
reasoning and decision making ... [to understand the effect of] prefrontal damage ... The Hebb-Penfield and Ackerly-Benton shared a number
of personality traits ... They are bereft of a theory of
their own mind and of the mind of those with whom they interact — Antonio R. Damasio

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in 'The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase 'granite and rainbow'. 'Truth' she envisions 'as something of granite-like solidity', and 'personality as
something of rainbow-like intangibility', and 'the aim of biography', she proposes, 'is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. — Jane Goldman

I am in exact accord with the belief of Thomas Edison that spirit is immortal, that there is a continuing center of character in each personality. But I don't know what spirit is, nor matter either. I suspect they are forms of the same thing. I never could see anything in this reputed antagonism between spirit and matter. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. — Henry Ford

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It. — G.K. Chesterton

People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past. — Gordon W. Allport

Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display 'personality'. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point. — Terry Eagleton

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
These seem like contradictory principles, but they are not. Free will can take us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz's research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.
We might call this the "rubber band theory" of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much. — Susan Cain

The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context. — Naomi Weisstein

Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat - graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over - she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory - Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot - she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square. — Marisha Pessl

In 1938, Louise Rosenblatt introduced reader response theory or the transactional view of reading. She asserted that what the reader brings to the reading act - his or her world of experiences, personality, and current frame of mind - is just as important in interpreting the text as what the author writes. According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader. — Carl M. Tomlinson

One of the most robust sex differences in personality research is the finding that women are higher in Agreeableness than men are. The difference is over half a standard deviation, which means that although there is plenty of overlap between the sexes, the average man scores lower than 70 per cent of women. Women have an advantage on theory of mind tasks too. Moreover, there is evidence that the difference is deep in our biology. When women are given testosterone experimentally, it reduces empathetic behaviour.19 — Daniel Nettle

You must have a theory," Bobby said. "Here it is. The killer has multiple personality disorder." Justine sighed. " And every one of his personalities is psychopathic. — Robert Patterson

Manners matter, asserts the professor. What provokes rebellion, he asserts, is not as often a theory out allowing for arbitrary power but be excessive, brusque use of it by a particular individual. — Robert J. Allison

Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)] — Thomas I. Emerson

Understanding a theory has, indeed, much in common with understanding a human personality. We may know or understand a man's system of dispositions pretty well; that is to say, we may be able to predict how he would act in a number of different situations. But since there are infinitely many possible situations, of infinite variety, a full understanding of a man's dispositions does not seem to be possible. — Karl Popper

All in all, the communally reared children of Israel are far from the emotional disasters that psychoanalytic theory predicted. Neither have they been saved from all personality problems, as the founders of the kibbutz movement had hoped when they freed children from their parents. In any reasonable environment, children seem to grow up to be themselves. There is no evidence that communal rearing with stimulating, caring adults is either the ruination or the salvation of children. — Sandra Scarr

I have, however, to live in an age of Faith - the sort of thing I used to hear praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don't know what other people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can't. But in practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the "self" is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships. — E. M. Forster

Take the rose - most people think it very beautiful: I don't care for It at all. I prefer the cactus, for the simple reason that it has a more interesting personality. It has wonderfully adapted itself to its surroundings! It is the best illustration of the theory of evolution in plant life. — Charles Proteus Steinmetz

No theory of the universe can be satisfactory which does not adequately account for the phenomena of life, especially in that richest form which finds expression in human personality. — Burnett Hillman Streeter

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan's music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping of Apple. — Walter Isaacson

Cooper had a theory about personality. Most people considered personality to be a singular identity. Malleable, sure, but essentially cohesive. But he tended to see people as more of a chorus. Every stage in life added a voice to that chorus. The different iterations of himself - lonely military brat, cocky teenager, faithful soldier, young husband, dedicated father, relentless hunter - they all existed within him. — Marcus Sakey

To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities. — Gordon W. Allport