Quotations about:
    inner self


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You see, there’s a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.

Patrick Rothfuss
Patrick Rothfuss (b. 1973) American author
The Name of the Wind, ch. 92 “The Music That Plays” [Bast] (2007)
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Added on 6-Apr-23 | Last updated 6-Apr-23
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You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Plato (c.428-347 BC) Greek philosopher
(Spurious)

Frequently attributed to Plato, starting in the 1950s, but not found in his works. Earliest citation is as a Portuguese proverb, in A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs, tr. Henry G. Bohn (1857): "Mais descobre huma hora de jogo, que hum anno de conversação." For more see here.
 
Added on 28-Feb-19 | Last updated 28-Feb-19
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For the whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character. Behind the pretty wallpaper and the brightly painted plaster lurk the yards of tangled wire and twisted pipes, ready to run a short or spring a leak on us without a word of warning.

Peter De Vries (1910-1993) American editor, novelist, satirist
Mrs. Wallop (1970)
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Often misquoted as "The difficulty with marriage is that ..."
 
Added on 1-Aug-18 | Last updated 1-Aug-18
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Character is simply habit long continued.

Plutarch (AD 46-127) Greek historian, biographer, essayist [Mestrius Plutarchos]
Moral Writings [Moralia], “On the Education of Children,” 4.3 [tr. Babbitt and Goodwin]
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Added on 29-Aug-17 | Last updated 29-Aug-17
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There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1898 [ed. Paine (1935)]
 
Added on 21-Jul-17 | Last updated 26-Jan-19
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The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.

Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
The Course of Love, “Irreconcilable Desires” (2016)
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Added on 20-Jul-17 | Last updated 20-Jul-17
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We can have no better clue to a man’s character than the company he keeps.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) Italian politician, philosopher, political scientist
The Discourses on Livy, Book 3, ch. 34 (1517) [tr. Thomson (1883)]
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Alt. trans.: "There is no better indication of a man's character than the company which he keeps."
 
Added on 18-Jul-17 | Last updated 27-Jan-20
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Every man has three characters — that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

Alphonse Karr
Alphonse Karr (1808-1890) French journalist and novelist
A Tour Round My Garden [Voyage autour de mon jardin] (1851)
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Added on 25-Apr-17 | Last updated 2-May-17
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People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“Worship,” The Conduct of Life, ch. 6 (1860)
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Added on 30-Jan-17 | Last updated 24-Feb-22
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We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

McEwan - cool and white - wist_info quote

Ian McEwan (b. 1948) English novelist and screenwriter
Amsterdam (1998)
 
Added on 26-Jul-16 | Last updated 26-Jul-16
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What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scarred snow summits and its vacant wastes of water — and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words — three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (2010)
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Added on 11-Mar-15 | Last updated 28-May-18
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Character is what you are in the dark.

Dwight Lyman "D. L." Moody (1837-1899) American evangelist and publisher
Sermon

Attributed by his son in William R. Moody, D. L. Moody, ch. 66 (1930), but quoted without citation before that (e.g., in Saint Andrew's Cross (Nov 1907), and The Outlook (6 Jun 1917)).
 
Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 7-Aug-17
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O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion ….

Robert Burns (1759-1796) Scottish national poet
“To a Louse,” l.43-46 (1786)

The poem is reprinted in various forms and anglicizations of Burns' Scottish, e.g.,

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An foolish notion

O would some Power the gift to give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:

 
Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 18-Aug-17
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It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man, to give the whole or the greater part of one’s quiet, leisure, and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honor.

[Es ist eine große Thorheit, um nach Außen zu gewinnen, nach Innen zu verlieren, d. h. für Glanz, Rang, Prunk, Titel und Ehre, seine Ruhe, Muße und Unabhängingkeit ganz oder großen Theils hinzurgeben.]

Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher
Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 1, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life [Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit],” ch. 2 “Personality, or What Man Is [Von dem, was einer ist]” (1851) [tr. Saunders (1890)]
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(Source (German)). Alternate translation:

It is a great folly to lose the inner man in order to gain the outer, that is, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure, and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honors.
[tr. Payne (1974)]

 
Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 3-Jan-23
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The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents, and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, social activist, preacher
“On Being a Good Neighbor,” sec. 1, sermon, A Gift of Love (1963)
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Added on 1-Feb-04 | Last updated 20-Jan-20
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