Quotes About Character

Nice person, bad person -- that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I can tell you she's either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.

She told me that real strength is the capacity for kindness to others, and that I should do whatever I could to find that kind of strength. She said she couldn't tell me how to go about doing that, because she never found it herself, but that people who where strong enough to be kind to others could always get by in this world.

She was an ordinary person. But by 'ordinary' I just mean that she didn't have any need to dramatize herself. It's not a criticism. I don't think of the urge to perform as something that adds to a person's character. If anything, it's a defect, especially when it's coupled with a need to compete.

Prefiero, señor, obrar bien y fracasar, antes que triunfar con malas artes. Palabras de Neoptólemo a Odiseo, en la tragedia griega Filoctetes.

Be that self that one is

the measure of a person's disposition is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions.

The person who lives in the ethical sphere lives intentionally, intensively. Such a person possesses character and conviction, and is thus willing to sacrifice himself for something greater than oneself.

In every generation that man is a rarity who exercises such a power over himself that he can will what is not pleasant to him, that he can hold fast that truth which does not please him, hold that it is the truth although it does not please him, hold that it is the truth precisely because it does not please him, and then nevertheless, in spite of the fact that it does not please him, can commit himself to it. pp 151-2

For it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do, and there is surely no one who thinks that anyone became great by winning the big lottery prize.

There was one who was great in his strength, and one who was great in his wisdom, and one who was great in hope, and one who was great in love;

But take heed to pay them willingly and promptly what money they should have. With those whom one despises, one on no account should have money differences, lest it might perhaps be said that it was to get out of paying them one avoided them. No, pay them double, in order that thy disagreement with them may be thoroughly clear: that what concerns them does not concern thee at all, namely, money; and on the contrary, that what does not concern them concerns thee infinitely, namely, Christianity.

People who never cried were the weakest of all.

The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.

Be as you wish to seem, an ancient had said. It was good advice. Because acting brave and being so are very much the same thing.

Terence: As my old da used to tell me, 'never trust a rich man'. David: Good thing I'm only moderately rich. Terence: Which is why I only moderately distrust you.

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.

I also hoped that my own track record, the things I'd written, the work I'd done, the person I had been, would be my best defense against the demonization of my character and motives that was taking place. But those were thoughts from before the time in which we all became too frightened of religion in general and one particular religion in particular—religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god.

the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man's ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life – or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny.

their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made.

But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world's culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.

But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when it is suicidal to do so. Additionally, or by way of confirmation, he is of brazen character, this fellow.

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.

that the truth often lies below the surface, and a man may be a great deal more than his most easily caricatured characteristics

Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by.