Quotes About Character

They can see the character, standing before them. The voice became iconic in its own right. Parents often ask me to do it for their children, who don't quite believe them. After all, any old man can claim to be the guy inside the gold suit and kids are rightly skeptical. 'Hello, I am See-Threepio, human-cyborg relations.' Then I see the magic. I watch as the sound enters their ears, it reaches their brain, it gets processed in moments. And suddenly. Smiles of recognition - and love.

Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it.

Bob Neuwirth: In his depravity, Lou was dignified. Dignified depravity.

It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.

In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paperclips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit in? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right. Though in Werner's weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she's the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense.

A real diamond, his father used to say, is never entirely free of inclusions. A real diamond is never perfect.

We will call him Omeir. One who lives long.

Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.

A real diamond is never perfect.

In a pit of mud, everyone looks like everyone else. It is the clean who are distinct. In a mob, everyone behaves like everyone else. It is the friend who is distinct.

Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.

Personally, I am always very nervous when I begin to speak. Every time I make a speech I feel I am submitting to judgment, not only about my ability but my character and honor. I am afraid of seeing either to promise more than I can perform, which suggests complete irresponsibility, or to perform less than I can, which suggests bad faith and indifference' (Cicero in Everitt, 58).

Personally, I am always very nervous when I begin to speak. Every time I make a speech I feel I am submitting to judgment, not only about my ability but my character and honor. I am afraid of seeming either to promise more than I can perform, which suggests complete irresponsibility, or to perform less than I can, which suggests bad faith and indifference.

virtue outweighs everything and even if the good man is not supremely happy, he is on balance happy.

All his life he suffered from first-night nerves. He acknowledged: Personally, I am always very nervous when I begin to speak. Every time I make a speech I feel I am submitting to judgment, not only about my ability but my character and honor. I am afraid of seeming either to promise more than I can perform, which suggests complete irresponsibility, or to perform less than I can, which suggests bad faith and indifference.

He who fight monsters must take care that he doesn't become one himself.

Your temperature's normal, though I'd say it's the only thing about you that is.

We all make choices, Cossack. Who we are in this world, what we do in it. Generous or selfish. Happy or sad. Good or evil. It's all down to choice.

He wasn't being deliberately offensive. It was just that offensive was his default mode.

He had an extraordinary presence that could be saturnine, threatening or magnetic, depending on his mood.

Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.

met a woman named Julia Rothman. She was very beautiful but a complete bitch.

It meant nothing to me. You can stick a piece of metal on a coward and a liar but it won't change what he is.