Quotes About Character

Don't imagine that we're doing ecological politics to save the world. We're doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It's a personal exercise in character and in manners. It's a matter of etiquette. It's a matter of living right. It's not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It's that we must do it because it's an aesthetic and ethical choice.

There is a character that you're born with, and there are tendencies that are prior to what your parents have socialized you into. There are definitely tendencies among girls to do certain things in certain ways, and there are tendencies in boys to do certain things, prior to socialization. Then socialization can enforce certain things or play down certain things. But you're not dealing with a totally blank slate.

We are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle

Reputations are easily obtained.

He was a rich man—richer, I think, than Mr. Macafee—and like most rich men he had nothing distinctive about him, the money having assumed for him the task of self-expression that, in poorer men, is assumed by the personality;

He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way—I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

Honesty, integrity, and intelligence cannot be kept down.

It has been my good fortune–or evil fortune, as it may be–that the places with which my life has been largely associated have been, with very few exceptions, of the most permanent character.

Undines are the elemental spirits of water, the word undine being derived from unda, wave. Like all elemental spirits, they partake of the character of their element, so undines are beautiful, restless, and suffocating.

And you, I think, are a good man of the kind who does not know himself to be one—some say that is the only kind.

A lot of people measure a man by what he's got. I've decided to measure myself by what I can give up.

la nobleza no depende de las posesiones, ya que la gente no siempre se ajusta al modelo

With all humility and abstinence, with all temperance and patience, with modest bearing and appearance was she. Discreet in answering was she always.

It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint—originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us.

Aufklärung des Verstands macht zwar klüger, aber nicht besser.

Die Pädagogik ist die Kunst, die Menschen sittlich zu machen.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.

a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

PICKERING:Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned? HIGGINS [moodily]:Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

People do not become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.