Quotes About Character

Flannery still wouldn't look at me. I didn't like that. Flannery was the kind of guy who lived for the Willy Loman world of shined shoes and eye contact. I knew the type. I didn't want anything to do with them, but I knew them.

Harry was not an attractive man. His eyes had enough bags under them to take a three-week cruise. His nose was caricature bulbous. His hair was a shock of white that wouldn't come down without the threat of gunfire. But his smile, well, it was beatific. The smile warmed her—brought her back and made her feel safe.

The only thing worth writing about is people. People . Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight.

DIscuss narking as a character flaw.

Er war eine Persönlichkeit geworden, etwas, das sie vor vielen Jahrzehnten aus dem System herausgefiltert hatten.

We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer. We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as "character is fate." In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as "personality is our destiny." In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne's Hester Prynne; George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy's Sue Bridehead; Henry James's Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence's Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe.

No job is ever "beneath" you. In whatever you do, do it to the best of your abilities.

We need leaders of principle, courage, character, wisdom, and discipline, and yet we seem trapped by a system of choosing our presidents that pushes those who possess those traits aside in favor of others who look good on television, are skilled at slandering and demonizing their opponents in a campaign, and are able to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars required to ensure election at any cost.

Even in the midst of defeat, carry yourself professionally and maintain your discipline. That is the quickest way towards recovery.

everyone deserves respect until they did something to lose it.

If a subordinate performs a task and the outcome is not what you expected, don't attack their intelligence or their character. Politely explain the deficiencies and offer an idea for a solution. Subordinates quickly lose respect for any leader who is "all problem and no solution.

1) He must be competent, (2) he must exercise good judgment, and (3) he must have character.

Leaders at all levels must know their stuff, be dead honest, have unquestioned personal integrity, set the example, and treat their people "fair and square.

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.

Atticus said, "I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it's not true.

hold your head high and keep those fists down - Atticus Finch

Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.

I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.