Contributed by: Sadia Munir on 13th June 2006 at http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/thepointofview
I came across an interesting passage while reading Resurrection by LeoTolstoy and thought of sharing it with all of you.
"There is hardly a superstition more common or more generally accepted than that which attributes definite traits of character to every individual, which affirms that a man is kind, wicked, wise, foolish, energetic, and so on. This is all wrong. We may say of a man that he is more frequently kind than cruel, oftener wise than foolish, or more energetic than apathetic, and vice versa. But it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, and of another that he is wicked and foolish. Yet this is our method of classifying mankind, and a very false method it is. Men are like rivers. The water is alike in all of them; but each river is narrow in some places and wide in others; now swift and now sluggish, sometimes clear and sometimes turbid; cold in winter and warm in summer. The same may be said of men. Each man bears within himself the germs of every human quality, displaying each in turn. We often say of a man he's not like himself, and yet we know him to be the same individual."
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