Quotes About Character

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

If the act is evil, the actor is evil.

Because human nature never changes.

You don't know who a person is until you see how he acts when given unexpected power. He hasn't rehearsed for the part. So what you see is what he is.

Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be

I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are and go ahead and LEAD. -Petra

Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.

Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that's so.

There's greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit.

Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.

Which of them, then, was more detestable? The one who was loathsome by nature, or the one who wanted to be loathsome but hadn't enough ambition to excel at it>

Evil isn't best served by equally evil servants.

She [Queen Isabella] will look at you as women look at men. She will judge you as women judge men. Not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness, or their prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character; the intesity of their passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and, ah, this above all...their conversation.

How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?

My husband is a good man, she said. It's important to him to be a good man. He has to not only be good, he has to believe that he's good. In the eyes of God, in my eyes, in his parents' eyes, in his own eyes. Good.

Why is it that the people who should be in authority are usually the people who don't want it, while the people who hold authority are usually the two-faced schemers who've stepped on people's backs to get it?

readers tend to like a character who is at least superficially like themselves. But they quickly lose interest unless this particular character is somehow out of the ordinary. The character may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero.

Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.

Four basic factors are present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis: milieu, idea, character, and event.

A person is what he says and does; that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.

Those are experiences that have shaped you. Hard experiences. Painful even. But you are who you are because of them." Other

It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.