Adam Smith Quotes

Everybody's born to be different, that's the one thing that makes us the same.

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

People read way too much into personalities and all that stuff.

By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

You cannot analyse your personality. It is like trying to understand the essential characteristics of a person.

I am literally just a human. I have the same brain as you; there's a skeleton under my skin just like yours.

While there are relatively few extreme introverts or extroverts, most of us lean in one direction or the other. If we lean more toward introversion, we'll generally prefer less social activity than more extroverted people. One inclination is not 'better' than another, but our culture can make it seem as if extroverts have a social advantage.

It's true that many say that [they] object to the idea of "human nature," but it's not clear what that is supposed to mean. Are we different from ants?

There are two types of people in life - those who get it and those who don't.

Every town, like every man, has its own countenance; they have a common likeness and yet are different; one keeps in his mind all their peculiar touches.

Do not make Mistakes about Character. That is the worst and yet easiest error. Better be cheated in the price than in the quality of goods. In dealing with men, more than with other things, it is necessary to look within. To know men is different from knowing things. It is profound philosophy to sound the depths of feeling and distinguish traits of character. Men must be studied as deeply as books.

I'm not different. I'm not different at all. The wrapping is different but the gift is still the same.

Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.

The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, and not of kind, even as there is between trees of the same species. Where in is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?

All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

You have to be able to differentiate between the different areas of life. It shows that we're all separate people, we're all different, but we're all the same.

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human"?