Innate Characteristics Quotes

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.

No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature.

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle's, and of a rabbit, rabbit's. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?

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

All are agreed that the various moral qualities are in a sense bestowed by nature: we are just, and capable of temperance, and brave, and possessed of the other virtues from the moment of our birth. But nevertheless we expect to find that true goodness is something different, and that the virtues in the true sense come to belong to us in another way. For even children and wild animals possess the natural dispositions, yet without Intelligence these may manifestly be harmful.

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.

You can't repeal human nature by an Act of Congress.

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

If our minds were originally formed by nature in a sound and useful manner, then they pass on all the forces of fate, which imposes on us from outside in a relatively unobjectionable and more acceptable way.

I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

We are all as God made us and frequently much worse.

You can't suppress the things that make us human. It's pointless to try.

I was made exactly the way I was meant to be made in who I am and my personality and the way I was born.

Humanity is a crazy contradiction. I accept us for who we are. We're not that great. Every time we take a step forward we go back to the same primitive behavior. We're meant to be this way. It's not our fault, it's just who we are.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.

What my research told me is that a psychopath cannot change. You're born like that.

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

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

What's bred in the bone will stick to the flesh.