Mercy Otis Warren Quotes

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

I think you have to see the high highs and the low lows to get to the core of what makes us tick as people.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

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.

I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

I think the way we react to things is a big indicator of our character and what type of person we are.

It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.

The twentieth century may well find historical status as the epoch in which man began to study himself as a scientific phenomenon.

I really do love psychology and philosophy but I'm no professional at these things. Because I love seeing the true side of humanity, as I've continued that, I have ultimately lent towards philosophy and psychology but it is not something in which I try to study.

I love to study people and pick apart what makes a person or character who they are. I never want to get complacent in that.

I think that our personalities and our souls have so much - we're so much more than just blood vessels and bone and muscle.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

We usually know what we can do, but temptation shows us who we are.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

Man is a universe within himself.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

The cynicism that you have is not your real soul.

Because everything we say and do is the length and shadow of our own souls, our influence is determined by the quality of our being.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.