#dispositions

We have nothing less to do than to get inside of whole peoples and change their motives and dispositions. ↗

— John Raleigh Mott

#dispositions #get #inside #less #motives

A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils. ↗

— Margaret Cavendish

#better #brute #celestial #civil #creatures

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were -- inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#family #heritage #identity #morality #past

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#dispositions #efficacy #except #happy #instruction

And not only my own brothers and sisters agreed so but my brothers and sisters in law; and their children, although but young, had the like agreeable natures and affectionate dispositions. ↗

— Margaret Cavendish

#agreeable #agreed #although #brothers #children

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. ↗

— Martha Washington

#depends #dispositions #experience #greater #happiness

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent. ↗

— Hugo Hamilton

#future #growing-up #growth #heritage #history

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man. ↗

— John Adams

#beloved #considered #desire #discovered #dispositions

The people were simpler, more peaceable and friendly in their manners and dispositions; and assassinations, which give the southern provinces so ill a reputation, were almost unknown. ↗

— Henry Walter Bates

#assassinations #dispositions #friendly #give #ill

General Reynolds immediately found himself engaged with a force which greatly outnumbered his own, and had scarcely made his dispositions for the action when he fell, mortally wounded, at the head of his advance. ↗

— Edward Everett

#advance #dispositions #engaged #fell #force