Quotes About Character

Character … is a habit, the daily choice of right over wrong; it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace and is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war.

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?

Staying in character avoided all of that, allowed you to prolong your respective roles for just a bit longer,

[The tramp character:] A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

A man's true character comes out when he's drunk.

We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.

I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children.

with a child on his first offence, and a grieved look is enough to convict the little transgressor; but let him go on until a habit of wrong-doing is formed, and the cure is a slow one; then the mother has no chance until she has formed in him a contrary habit of well-doing.

Many men are neither worthy of their wives, nor of their dogs.

Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.

The more of a person we succeed in making a child, the better will he both fulfil his own life and serve society.

Celebrity is a corrosive condition for the soul. I have tried to restrain its inroads on me, but there are odd corners of my character that have been harmed

Many try to be "on" as leaders & happy to be "off stage" but truly those that live their lives as leaders do not have to try to be the one & being worth a hollow follow on social media... it is not the same as being worth a soul commitment in a no shadows real life…

if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

Without temptation, there was no virtue in resistance.

And the princess herself... she was no simple cartoon anymore, but a fully fledged character. She had wild black hair with electric blue streaks, and her mouth was set in a determined line. She looked very much like May imagined Libby might, had she lived to see high school. Tough and pretty. Slim and tall. Ready to kick some butt.

I understand a woman who validates herself by getting attention from the opposite sex. I have a friend who is that to a T... Doesn't mean she isn't a good person. That's a funny character to play.

When people cheat in any arena, they diminish themselves-they threaten their own self-esteem and their relationships with others by undermining the trust they have in their ability to succeed and in their ability to be true.

He was a man whose calmness reflected his confidence that he meant whatever he did-- which is different... from confidence that whatever he did was right.

The antagonists who evoke the most emotion are the ones who could have been heroes if they'd made better choices.