Adam Smith Quotes

People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them.

I think you are a product of the environment you surround yourself in, and everything you've experienced is a part of you and the fabric you are in.

I'm very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.

It's nature-nurture, right? I've been nurtured by Californians.

The virtues [moral excellence] therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

The difference between a serial killer and a saint is environment. That's a very hard thing to accept because that raises a lot of questions

The greatest work in all the world is the building of men and women of character. Without character there is not much that is worthwhile.

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

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.

I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.

Character is, for the most part, simply habit become fixed.

In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference.

Men are born, and then they're formed.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.

Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky.

Remember that your character is the sum total of your habits.

The history of mankind is his character.

These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole.

Habits are formed, not at one stroke, but gradually and insensibly; so that, unless vigilant care be employed, a great change may come over the character without our being conscious of any.

The choices that make a significant difference in our lives are the tough ones. They're not often fun or easy, but they're the ones we have to make, and each is a deliberate step toward better understanding who we really are.