Quotes About Character

You've been through a great deal," his mother conceded. "But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I'd like to see a little more backbone in you.

A Republican, then?" Jack asked, after a moment. "Oh, for God's sake." Olive stopped walking, looked at him through her sunglasses. "I didn't say moron. You mean because we have a cowboy for a president? Or before that an actor who played a cowboy? Let me tell you, that idiot ex-cocaine-addict was never a cowboy. He can wear all the cowboy hats he wants. He's a spoiled brat to the manor born. And he makes me puke.

When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think.

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

I don't think he is a bad man," Clemenceau would sometimes say of Wilson, "but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good."35

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, "is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous," especially in our daily dealings with others.

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the "Scottish school," as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

a man's a man for a' that." To the Scot, appearance and outward form mean little. Instead, it is the quality of one's inner self

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

De levenswijsheid van een grijsaard kun je lezen uit zijn rimpels, de moed van een veldheer uit zijn verwondingen. Zo is ieder met wat hem getekend heeft getooid.

Honor is decency without vanity.

I do not know, but they are very rough. I suppose they would do almost anything for money. They smell strongly of liquor." Slowly

silence is not weakness and decency is not pride

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man

The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.

The unregenerate do not really believe in the holiness of God. Their conception of His character is altogether one-sided. They fondly hope that His mercy will override everything else. "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether as thyself" (Psa 50:21) is God's charge against them.

The development of wickedness is one thing; the presence of any measure of holiness or virtue is another.

The unregenerate do not really believe in the holiness of God. Their conception of His character is altogether one-sided. They fondly hope that His mercy will override everything else. "Thou