Temperment Quotes

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.
Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers. ~ Susan Cain

No one can say how far Herr Hitler's empire will extend before this war is over, but I have no doubt it will pass away perhaps more swiftly than Napoleon's empire and without its glory. The British spirit and temperment, bred in freedom, will prove more enduring and resilient than the most efficient mechanical discipline.
Winston Churchill ~ Michael Tappenden

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. ~ Marcel Proust

The doctor drummed the fingers of his left hand on the edge of the table, a strange gesture which suggested, Isabel thought, an impatient temperment. Perhaps he had been obliged to listen too long to those whom he did not consider his intellectual equal, exhausted patients with long-running complaints, unable to put their views succinctly. Some doctors could become like that, she thought, just as some lawyers could; prolonged exposure to flawed humanity could create a sense of superiority if one was not careful
and perhaps he was not. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperment, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work
surrounds them with a sensuous life
and cuts them off from the normal sources of living. ~ Max Lerner

He was not surly by temperment, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced
and friendship nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation. ~ Eleanor Catton

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon's ark was James Andrew Manallace - a darkish, slow northerner of a type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. ("Dayspring Mishandled") ~ Rudyard Kipling

He was very much a man of moods, possibly owing to what is styled the artistic temperment. I have never seen, myself, why the possession of artistic ability should be supposed to excuse a man from a decent exercise of self-control. ~ Agatha Christie