Personal Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

An a priori decision to eliminate spiritual intelligence from consideration is no more justifiable than a decision to admit it by fiat or on faith. After all, once one includes the understanding of the personal realm within a study of intelligence, such human proclivities as the spiritual must legitimately be considered. There certainly are no easy grounds for a decision, but several other intelligences deal with phenomena other than sheer physical matter. If the abstract realm of mathematics constitutes a reasonable area of intelligence (and few would challenge that judgment), why not the abstract realm of the spiritual?

The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.

I ask for the movement to continue, for the movement to grow, because last week I got a phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. And after all, that's what this is all about. It's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power — it's about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, hope. You gotta give them hope.

The judge's authority depends upon the assumption that he speaks with the mouth of others. That is to say, the momentum of his utterances must be greater than any which his personal reputation and character can command, if it is to do the work assigned to it — if it is to stand against the passionate resentments arising out of the interests he must frustrate — for while a judge must discover some composition with the dominant trends of his times, he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past.

I know that the real Brockovich liked to dress provocatively; that's her personal style and she's welcome to it. But the Hollywood version makes her look like a miniskirted hooker, with bras that peek cheerfully above her necklines.

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.

Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting — in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard — reaching for the highest that is in us — becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success. Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have.

Personal publicity is apt to be dangerous to any writer's integrity; for the moment he begins to fancy himself as quite a person, a taint creeps into his work.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

It is fear that drives [the hippies] to seek the warmth, the protection, the safety of a herd. When they speak of merging themselves into a "greater whole," it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies - and what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance.

I'm not attacking anyone. I have no animosity towards Lana, I was just trying to put things in perspective from personal experience

Frances Bean Cobain

i met a toad
the other day by the name
of warty bliggens
he was sitting under
a toadstool
feeling contented
he explained that when the cosmos
was created
that toadstool was especially
planned for his personal
shelter from sun and rain
thought out and prepared
for him

An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.

Tullian Tchividjian

Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation.

Miguel de Unamuno

I'm very interested in the 'Culture of Interpretation.' I'm convinced that each great artist has his own personal style, but it is his artistic responsibility in developing this style to respond other interpretations, either prior or at the same time. I'm convinced that Rubinstein would have presented us another Chopin if Cortot had not existed. Cortot presented very romantic Chopin interpretations - really masterly, outstanding, but confused. Rubinstein's immediate answer was a very classical Chopin. He was really the first to point out the classical line and structure in his oeuvre.

Burkard Schliessmann

The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.

Fine. You win. I quit. You two deal with this. I'm going home. Packing up all my personal items, and when you, Caleb, end up dead because the coach has your jockstrap or something else I didn't steal but someone else did, don't call me. I'm done and I'm going to hide in a bunker until all of this is over with. – Nick I hate you, Nick. – Caleb Feels mutual, Demon. – Nick

Sherrilyn Kenyon

The public pays and feels it is entitled to participate in the personal affairs of a performer.

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

Dorothy L. Sayers

He [Jasper Johns] and I were each other's first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you' and then I'd have to find one for him.

Robert Rauschenberg

Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.

Everyone needs a warm personal enemy or two to keep him free from rust in the movable parts of his mind.

Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter.

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.

Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors - in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner - and inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions.

Dieter Wisliceny