Meryl Streep Quotes

Personality traits form at an early age and are fixed by early adulthood. Many important things about you change over the course of your lifetime, but your personality isn't one of them.

Children come into the world with a lot of personality already imbedded in them.

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

We don't invent our natures. They're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else.

You just are born the way that you're born.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

I'm a very melancholic kind of person. I don't know why; I think certain people are born a certain way.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.

Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

I am obsessed with why people turn out the way they are.

You know, there's a tremendous amount of genetic propensity not necessarily for what TV shows you like but for literally how you view the world, how you react to things, how things touch you and how things move you.

Human nature refers to what is in people but which they cannot study or work at achieving.

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

Some people are genetically programmed to be difficult.

A person's current personality of love, hatred, jealousy, rage or a murderous intent and so on is formed upon genetic elements, education, the environment and a family a person grows in.

But with each passing year and each new study, the evidence for the genetic contribution to individual and group differences becomes more firmly established than ever.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

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.

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.