Nowadays, when Freudism is discredited, the author recalls with a whistle of wonder that not so long ago--say before 1959 (i.e., b...efore the publication of the first of the seven forewords to his Englished novels)Ma child's personality was supposed to split automatically in sympathetic consequence of parental divorce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a very important and fundamental relation between learning and personality development. . . . The two interact in a "circ...ular process." Thus, mastery of symbol systems (letters, words, numbers), reasoning, judging, problem-solving, acquiring and organizing information and all such intellectual functions are fed by and feed into varied aspects of the personality--feelings about oneself, identity, potential for relatedness, autonomy, creativity, and integration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the fac...e of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and ...dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food--not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe...-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in o...ther directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise--even in their own field.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: t...hey have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a normal person the motor and sensory nervous systems act as the windows of the individual personality.... [ellipsis in origina...l] The broken, many-stained and pictorial windows through which the light is struggling under disadvantages to harmonize itself with the physical world at large are found in three classes of persons--the mentally deficient, the morally deficient, and the insane. In these, the light is there, but the images, as in a broken cathedral window, are more or less shattered and confused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »