Anne Enright Quotes

People don't change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less

When the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface

My life is my statement and I try to be true to myself and thusly to other people. Whatever my failings are, they are human and I try to perfect it each day.

My point is, people really don't change very much.

All these people who say success changes people; well, no, it just magnifies what's there.

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.

A man's character never changes radically from youth to old age. What happens is that circumstances bring out characteristics which have not been obvious to the superficial observer.

It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characteristics are just part of that special soul of that human being.

Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

Victory doesn't lie in taming our nature but in progressively discovering and revealing more of it.

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

We must at times search our own souls and discover what we really are. Our real character, much as we would wish, cannot be hidden.

People are not evil; they are schlemiels.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

Temptations and occasions put nothing into a man, but only draw out what was in him before.

It is their character indeed that makes people who they are. But it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse.

People don't change just because you know more about them.

People are like books, unknown until they are opened.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.

People don't really change. Not fundamentally. When they surprise us, it is because we failed to recognize their potentialities.

The depth and strength of our character is defined by our moral code. People only reveal themselves when they're thrown out of the usual conditions of their lives. That's when the truth of who they are is revealed.

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them. —SUZANNE NECKER, WIFE OF JACQUES NECKER, MINISTER OF FINANCE

You can't really make people be any different than what they are.