Personality
Arnold is depicted as an average nine-year-old boy, his personality enriched with righteous, reliable morals and honesty. His parents were explorers who mysteriously vanished on an expedition during Arnold's infancy, leaving their son presumably orphaned and living in an apartment building with his grandparents and pet pig Abner. Albeit Arnold's admirable kindness normally remains untouched, his less considerate moments include revealing the mortifying secret of a friend and partaking in the savage rebellion being pulled by the fourth-graders against their new, mild-mannered teacher, Mr. Simmons. However, aside from that Arnold is usually intelligent and righteous; he once snuck out with his grandmother late at night to emancipate a sea turtle from an exhibit in a local aquarium and can be relied upon to provide his friends with good advice. Other examples of his generosity include showing kindness to his lonesome, neglected classmate Helga Pataki during their first day of nursery school, resulting in her development of an obsessive an unrequited infatuation with him that is commonly referenced throughout the series, albeit she masks it with surly behavior. Arnold's best friend is Gerald, characterized by his towering black hairstyle, who appears alongside him in virtually every episode and who frequently hangs around with him.
Read more about this topic: Arnold (Hey Arnold!)
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)