Disposition

A disposition is a natural or deliberately learned habit or tendency to act in a specified way.

Quotes

• I hold virtue, in general, or the virtues severally, to be only in the disposition, each a feeling, not a principle.
  • Byron, Letter to R. C. Dallas, January 21, 1808

• To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand, is to fall into superstition.
  • Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), § 2111

• We cannot avoid moodiness; but we may turn to account, as does the poet, the various dispositions of the mind, or give them form and shape, as the sculptor his marble.
  • Ernst Feuchtersleben, Dietetics of the Soul

• In the “fulfilment” of both the laws and duty, ... the moral disposition ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law, and therefore this correspondence of law and inclination is life and, as the relation of differents to one another, love.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate

• There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many, which is utterly incompatible with all virtue or moral sentiment; and as it can proceed from nothing but the most depraved disposition, so in its turn it tends still further to encourage that depravity. This principle is, that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations.
  • David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Appendix 2

• Not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God. ... From a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God.
  • Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Book IV, Part 1, Section 1

• Your beauty should not be an external one, consisting of braided hair or the wearing of gold ornaments and dresses. Instead, it should be the inner disposition of the heart, consisting in the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which God values greatly.
  • 1 Peter 3:3-4

See also

• Character
• Mood
• Psychological type