Quotes About Character

If you want to get people to like you, you must always lead the conversation on to the subject of their characters. Nothing pleases them so much. They'll talk with enthusiasm for hours and go away saying that you're the most charming, cleverest person they've ever met.

for by introspection and by listening to other people's judgements of our character we ca all, if we so desire, come to a very shrewd understanding of our flaws and weaknesses and real, as opposed to the avowed and advertised, motives or our actions. If most of use remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass ? but made up for it by being shortlived.

an ounce of honest pride is better than a ton of false humility, although an ounce of true humility is worth an ounce of honest pride

Un giorno, che eravamo seduti in un parco, mi spiegò che tutti abbiamo una certa idea di noi stessi, magari appena abbozzata, confusa, ma alla fine siamo portati ad avere una certa idea di noi stessi, e la verità è che spesso quell'idea la facciamo coincidere con un certo personaggio immaginario in cui ci riconosciamo.

Quello che dovremmo capire è che noi siamo tutta la storia, non solo quel personaggio.

Maybe we judge people too much by their looks because it's easier than seeing what's really important.

People make such a big deal about looks, but after a while, when you know someone, you don´t even notice anymore...

You are ugly now, on the inside, where it matters most...you are beastly.

Surface beauty: blond hair, blue eyes - she was looking at me - is always easy to recognize. But if someone is braver, stronger, smarter, that's harder to see. - Kendra Hilferty

A good education and a kind heart will serve you well throughout your entire life.

Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing.

What is left of you once your clothes have had their say?

There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents.

It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.

Such men knew their worth, but did not flaunt it. Such men could look anybody in the eye without flinching; even a poor man, a man with nothing, could stand upright in the presence of those who had wealth or power. People did not know, Mma Ramotswe felt, just how much we had in those days—those days when we seemed to have so little, we had so much. She

It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves-or, more usually, others-by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.

The loudly good are often not the best of people; the intuitively good, to whom it may not occur ever to discuss what they do, let alone why they do it, may be morally unsung, but are heroes nonetheless.

It is undoubtedly the case that the practice of the virtues makes one happier. We've somewhat lost sight of that essential truth, now that we, as a society, admire selfishness and vanity so much.

He is a good, kind man," said Mma Potokwane. "And such men are often too busy. I have noticed that round here too. That man I was talking to just then—one of our groundsmen—he is like that. He is so kind that everybody asks him to do everything. We had a bad-tempered man working here once and he had nothing to do because nobody, apart form myself, of course, had the courage to ask him to do anything.

It did not matter in the least what bed you were born in: what counted was what you were inside. People in England, she suspected, sometimes just did not grasp that and that was a pity: their society was more stratified than Scotland's; they needed to read Robert Burns's A Man's a Man for a' That, she felt, because that said all that had to be said on that subject. If you understood what Burns was saying in that poem, then you understood how Scotland felt—at heart.

There's no excuse," said Isabel firmly. "Biscuits are trivial, but lies are not.

It was always the strongest men who were the first to cry, thought Mma Ramotswe. Some people said it was the other way round, but they were wrong, she told herself; they were simply wrong. (To the Land of Long Lost Friends)