One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some a particular way - said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but very river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy, or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.'
Leo Tolstoy in David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.36.
