Quotes About Character

And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform.

I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether—if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence.

If we do not know the character of being itself - I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it - then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything that participates in being. And the assertion of the existence, or the nonexistence, of God is the ultimate exhaustive description.

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn't even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

In eternity people's lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.

She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.

There was no more the stoop of her high

Marilynne Robinson

When defects of character are your character, you become a what.

Actions defined a man; words were a fart in the wind.

She was the only person in the world who could make him act against his own nature

The Don always taught that when a man was generous, he must show the generosity as personal.

I would trust you with my whole fortune," he told the president. "I would trust you with my life and the welfare of my children. It is inconceivable to me that you would ever trick me or otherwise betray me. My whole world, all my faith in my judgment of human character would collapse.

How I would like that now, that sheer senseless falling in love with externals, the love never earned by qualities of goodness, of character, of intelligence, of wit, of charm, of life-force. In short, how I would like to be loved in a way never earned so that I would never have to keep earning it or work for it

friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.

It's more important that you grow up to be a man," he said, "than to be a genius.

But great men are not born great, they grow great, and so it was with Vito Corleone.

Actions define a man,words are just a fart in the wind.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties...broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness.

Y es el sufrimiento del alma, sobre todo, el que hace buenos a los buenos

Aubrey Davenport was dressed like a fop, had the manners of a fop, and appeared to have the intelligence of a potato.

It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.

Dad's "Theory of Arrogance"—that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway play.