Character Quotes

Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

Antonin Scalia

It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - From lack of character.

Dag Hammarskjld

Strong feelings do not necessarily make a strong character. The strength of a man is to be measured by the power of the feelings he subdues not by the power of those which subdue him.

William Carleton

Character is who you are when no one is looking.

Allan Williams

You can tell the character of every man when you see how he receives praise.

Seneca, Epistles

We falsely attribute to men a determined character - Putting together all their yesterdays - And averaging them - we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support - It is worse than a large family - He is the silent poor indeed.

Henry David Thoreau

Pride sullies the noblest character.

Claudianus

During my eighty - Seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.

Bernard Mannes Baruch

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is the indelible mark that determines the only true value of all people and all their work.

Orison Swett Marden

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

Hermann Hesse

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.

Isabelle Eberhardt

There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.

Mahatma Gandhi

Character builds slowly but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

Faith Baldwin

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Being another character is more interesting than being yourself.

Sir John Gielgud

Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Charles Reade

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, Here comes number seventy - One.

Richard M. Devos

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Albert Einstein

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

Henry David Thoreau

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.

Henry Ford

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto p. 74 (pb 93)

To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

It is possible that the scrupulously honest man may not grow rich so fast as the unscrupulous and dishonest one but the success will be of a truer kind, earned without fraud or injustice. And even though a man should for a time be unsuccessful, still he must be honest better lose all and save character. For character is itself a fortune...

Samuel Smiles

Freedom and indedendence form my character.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Founder of modern Turkey 24. 04. 1921

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Heywood

Common - Sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Kahlil Gibran

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

Thomas Paine

The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, And let it spring from love Born out of concern for all beings.

The Buddha

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate - To surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.

Thomas Jefferson

Character is what can do without success.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Working hard overcomes a who lot of other obstacles. You can have unbelievable intelligence, you can have connections, you can have opportunities fall out of the sky. But in the end, hard work is the true, enduring characteristic of successful people.

Marsha Evans

Boredom is a sign of satisfied ignorance, blunted apprehension, crass sympathies, dull understanding, feeble powers of attention, and irreclaimable weakness of character.

James Bridie