Quotes & Sayings About Physical Characteristics

After years of research, depth psychologists and others argue that each sex carries both the psychological and physical traits of the other. No man is purely masculine, just as there is no purely feminine woman. Jungian psychologists call the feminine characteristics of the male psyche the Anima; the female psyche's masculine characteristics they the Animus.
Both the Animus and Anima develop in complex fashion as the personality grows to maturity. Neither men nor women can reach psychological maturity without integrating their respective contrasexual other. A man's female elements enhance his manhood, just as a woman's male aspects enhance her womanhood. — Douglas Gillette

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. — Tom Robbins

Deep within every modern American female, whether she will admit it or not, lingers the image of an ideal man. It isn't necessarily photo quality, it rarely involves specific physical characteristics. No, this image is more like the promise of a feeling, a swept-off-your-feet, powerless-to-control-it, how-awesome-is-this-guy sentiment that she hopes someone special will someday inspire. Left to its own devices, the brain will keep this feeling dormant until truly warranted by a real-life flesh-and-blood person. — Libby Street

What we think of as 'Physical beauty' is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness intelligence among them. — Robert A. Heinlein

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival
or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda. — Naomi Wolf

When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant. — Lisa Unger

To see and appreciate the soul of others with whom you are in a relationship is a higher state of awareness. To see only their outer characteristics provides a limited and incomplete perspective. Their current personality, just like their current physical body, is a temporary manifestation. They have had many bodies and many personalities but only one enduring soul, only one continuous spiritual essence. See this essence and you will see the real person. — Brian L. Weiss

Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other. — Pascal Bruckner

They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white ... , they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning. — John Howard Griffin

There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism. — Martin Seligman

What an experiment will give, to put a writer in the dark, ask her to stretch a character of the human kind with no physical characteristics attached? Will this character emerge with no prejudice in kind or one of a new kind, an organism cultured in the dark to what light may not reflect? Humanity absorbed or rudely deflected? — Dew Platt

None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize. — Dian Fossey

The chemists work with inaccurate and poor measuring services, but they employ very good materials. The physicists, on the other hand, use excellent methods and accurate instruments, but they apply these to very inferior materials. The physical chemists combine both these characteristics in that they apply imprecise methods to impure materials. — Wolfgang Ostwald

You have to look for a unique quality in that person and it's not just always physical. I don't think models are great models because of their face or their body. Obviously, I think their physical characteristics are important, but I think it's very much about your personality and inner beauty and really understanding how to be a great model instinctively. And that's where it all comes from. — Michael Flutie

Positive feelings come from being honest about yourself and accepting your personality, and physical characteristics, warts and all; and, from belonging to a family that accepts you without question. — Willard Scott

Vampires as creatures have evolved over time as different vampire bloodlines have hit different populations of humans. Every once in a while the blood will make something new and mutate into a new species with different powers, abilities, weakness, physical characteristics, and so on. I don't want to give anything away, but there are whole species and branches that date all the way back to pre-modern times. — Scott Snyder

Gathered together in this fashion, Jerry could see that the Whitstables possessed certain common physical characteristics, including wayward teeth, large earlobes, and the sort of stress-related blotchiness usually found in cornered jellyfish. — Christopher Fowler

I doubt if Dickens did, especially his women-his pretty women-Mrs. Dombey, Florence, Dora, Agnes, Ruth Pinch, Kate Nickleby, little Emily-we know them all through Hablot Browne alone-and none of them present any very marked physical characteristics. They are sweet and graceful, neither tall nor short; they have a pretty droop in their shoulders, and are very ladylike; sometimes they wear ringlets, sometimes not, and each would do very easily for the other. — George Du Maurier

While there have been great technological advances in the study of the brain, yielding enormous amounts of data on its physical and psychological characteristics, the old problem of relating mind to brain in a reasonable fashion remains unaccomplished. — Michael Gazzaniga

Ghettos have their own characteristics and consequences :
be they physical. social, intellectual or mental, those who live in them always nurture projection of themselves or world around them that are more imaginary than true.
In the ghettos of the intellect and idealistic theories, there are a lot of intertolerant and racist people who do not realize that they are. — Tariq Ramadan

When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.
Losing on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck?
If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are. — Lance Armstrong

God loves you as do I and no matter what physical characteristics that differ from each and every one of us, we are but one family under the heavens. — Eric Anthony

And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it's hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room. — James Lee Burke

We must distinguish between genes that cause physical characteristics, like the color of your eyes or hair, over which you have no control, and what we could call 'behavioral dispositions'. We are responsible for our behavior, no matter what those dispositions are. — Erwin W. Lutzer

What I learned about them, I liked. But it also seemed that the liberal line was not entirely correct, for it was obvious that racial differences went far beyond skin color. It would be difficult to categorize all the distinctions I noticed. In fact, I made no effort to catalogue them at the time, but their differences ranged all the way from physical characteristics to more subtle differences such as extreme aversion for work in cold weather. On cold days, when I felt invigorated, my black co-workers seemed lethargic. — David Duke

When God introduced man to the angels, Satan became the first racist. Satan belonged to a race of beings called angels, man to a new race of beings called humans. In Satan's mind, angels, particularly he himself, were far greater than mankind simply by design. In other words, Satan determined himself to superior to man based on immutable physical characteristics; therefore, he should not bow to man, man should bow to him. Although disobedience precipitated his fall, the concept of racial superiority ignited Satan's rebellion. — Amir Clayton Powell

Your intent to find a mate sends out 'strands of consciousness'
however, composed of desire and intent. Like detectives, these
search the world, looking in a completely different way than
a physical sleuth. The world is probed with your characteristics
in mind, seeking for someone else with characteristics that will
best suit your own. — Seth

California and Italy are about the same size. Roughly speaking, California contains about 150,000 square miles, Italy about 120,000 square miles. They are not dissimilar in physical characteristics. They extend over a long distance from north to south, and each has an extensive coastline. Each is destitute of coal mines. Each produces large quantities of wheat. Each produces citrus and other fruits, olives, wine, and raisins. The climate is about the same, although California's is superior. They are in about the same zone. Rome lies in about the same latitude as San Francisco. Our state is one of the richest and most fertile of all the United States. Yet suppose that California were as populous as Italy - someday it will be. Suppose it had a population of millions. Could California, even with its vast resources, support an army of a quarter of a million men as Italy does? She could do it only as Italy does, by grinding the people into the dust with oppressive taxation. — Jerome Hart

In psychologist Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love, he identifies three characteristics: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is defined as physical attraction and sexual connection, intimacy as the sense of being close and bonded, and commitment as the decision to be together exclusively. As a romantic relationship moves through time, one of these three characteristics is carrying the most weight. Accordingly, although romantic love offers both intimacy and passion/sex, commitment is needed to complete the triangle. — Susan Shapiro Barash

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. We know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing. Before we make music, music makes us. — Joachim-Ernst Berendt

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies ... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality ... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad. — Cornel West

None of them, not even he, seemed to realize they weren't just physical beings, that God had left a mark upon them by the simple fact of his creation. They preferred their idols, tangible, possessing, capricious characteristics like themselves, easily understood. They wanted something they could manipulate. God was inconceivable, intangible, incomprehensible, unexploitable. — Francine Rivers

There it was. There was no sense of him, or her, as I had thought there might be - but there was certainly a sense of Someone. I wondered whether perhaps babies had no gender - physical characteristics aside - until birth, when the act of exposure to the outside world set them forever as one or the other. — Diana Gabaldon

The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable pre-condition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities. — Albert Einstein

I get typecast as doctors, principals, middle-management-type guys - which, when you look at me, you realize is completely against my physical characteristics. I should be an action hero. So I don't understand what's going on. — Brian Huskey

Housekeepers, homemakers, wives, and mothers are fundamental social relations, which rest upon woman's characteristics, physical, mental, and moral. — R. Heber Newton

The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't. — Sidney Lumet

To be a housewife is to be a member of a very peculiar occupation, one with characteristics like no other. The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the market in which the workers find jobs, and the physical hazzards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations. — Barbara Bergmann

The level of potential physical productivity of a society depends on both the development of the intellect of its members, and a minimal standard of both demographic characteristics and of consumption. — Robert Trout

In the characteristics of the perfected man of the Gita, I do not see any to correspond to physical warfare. — Mahatma Gandhi

With full responsibility for my words as a professional biologist, I do not hesitate to say that all existing and genuine knowledge about the way in which the physical characteristics of human communities are related to their cultural capabilities can be written on the back of a postage stamp. — Lancelot Hogben

This is the mitochondrial DNA." Bowers nodded back to the cryo-case. "It's the genetic material that actually makes the energy that powers our cells. Think of it like this. Each of our cells has the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes that make us human and determine our physical appearance, how we fight off disease, and other physical characteristics. Now think of the mitochondria as little organisms within our cells. Like cells within a cell. It's those little organisms that make energy for our cells. And they have their own DNA." "I — Jonathan Brookes

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community. — Daniel Everett

Genetics help to some degree, but the most important thing is the mind and the spirit. These two are even more powerful than physical characteristics that are passed on. — Serge Nubret

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read. — Gabrielle Zevin

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance ... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us. — Joan D. Vinge

The caste system, in all its various forms, is always based on identifiable physical characteristics - sex, color, age. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Racism is taught in our society ... it is not automatic.
It is learned behavior toward persons with
dissimilar physical characteristics. — Alex Haley

The physical characteristics of the child Jesus will always remain a point of discussion. No artist has ever produced a type, nor ever will, that has in it all that the varying minds of all time will acknowledge as complete. — Henry Ossawa Tanner

I know I am judged unfairly by my physical characteristics and ostracized because of that so I say, "Yes, I'm a black man." — Chuck D

The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics - the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw - but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse. — Bayard Taylor