Quotes About Character

I wondered if one's life history was the result of world-lines collapsing in response to simple force of character. The dilemma had not been solved in a thousand years of human philosophy.

Cheaters never prosper. (Because they suck.)

Cheaters never prosper

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you've read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison—or the Old Testament, for that matter—you'll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse.

Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.

Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word. It's how we respond that defines us.

When people got into the habit of lying, they came to depend on it as a means of sliding easily through life.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Billy Graham once said, "We are the Bibles the world is reading. We are the creeds the world is needing. We are the sermons the world is heeding.

FN-2187 was simply Eight-Seven

How you do anything is how you do everything.

We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, the more we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision.

So it is, I believe, in every area of our lives. The more we choose something, the harder it is to choose otherwise, until we finally are solidified—eternalized—in our decision. The momentum of our character becomes unstoppable.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said "an unhappy childhood." Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that's how novels worked.

It's a hard man who's only just, and a sad man who's only wise.

A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.

The strength and wildness and will that I found in him were more and better than all the truth and goodness in the world. I pledged myself to him as brother and friend no matter what he'd done and no matter what he was.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time

honour is the art of being humble.

it's a very hard thing to resist, real goodness, in a tough man.

It doesn't matter what you did, or what you were. It doesn't even matter what you are. It's what you try to be that counts.