Quotes About Character

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behaves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

He was talking in a voice which didn't sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice.

Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran's and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran 'is a real straight guy - definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.

I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers.

Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin's part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me it was that first fall term in Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food - aquired then and largely I must admit in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class...

I doubt if she's ever used a broom in her life," he said sarcastically. "Except to ride on, of course.

I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.

Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could "not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.

Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life—a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.

My reading was always a kind of living," he explained later, "a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

no man is superior, unless it was by merit, and no man is inferior, unless by his demerit.

Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheet a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character.

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.

all his life he had "endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice.

Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.

Moreover, he objected, "I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don't like to begin now.

Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did. On the contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that "such of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.

American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, "that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, 'This is the real me!

He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.

Nevertheless, no other speech proved "so effective, none so full of character and none which found so responsive an audience. It carried everything before it, and old campaigners sighed that such energy was beyond them.