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This is the essence of character: the will and ability to put principle into action. (Scott Allen)
Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness. (Faith Baldwin)
I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I'd say, 'You're very talented and I'll try to help you, but I don't want anything else to do with you.' (Ingmar Bergman)
Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have. (Anthony Bourdain)
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones. (Phillips Brooks)
Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men. (Jean de La Bruyere)
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back. (Abigail van Buren)
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mould and chisel and complete a character. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, for your character is what you are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. (Dale Carnegie)
Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality. (Alexis Carrel)
Watch your character for your character is your destiny. (Winston Churchill)
We repeat again: strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one's balance in spite of them. (Carl von Clausewitz)
Character is a journey, not a destination. (Bill Clinton)
Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character. (Dan Coats)
When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. (Confucius)
Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency. (Quentin Crisp)
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. (Richard Dawkins)
There is no index of character so sure as the voice. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Change is an easy panacea. It takes character to stay in one place and be happy there. (Elizabeth Clarke Dunn)
Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing. (Ilya Ehrenberg)
Character is higher than intellect. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Elegance is a question of personality, more than one's clothing. (Jean Paul Gaultier)
There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks. (David Lloyd George)
- The Tipping Point...
Character... isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be... Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. (Malcolm Gladwell)
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Reputation is for time; Character is for eternity. (John B. Gough)
When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost. (Billy Graham)
- to Catharine Whyte...
I myself incline to drift, to accept a lesser situation rather than strive for a greater, and yet, I know that character in life and art is only made by an effort that is quite beyond one's ordinary everyday acceptance of things as they are. (Lawren Harris)
If you want to know what a man's character is really like... ask him to tell you the living person he most admires – for hero worship is the truest index of a man's private nature. (Sydney J. Harris)
Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That is what caricature is all about. (Al Hirschfeld)
The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do. (John Holt)
Nobody can put a character on paper without – at any rate in part and at times – sitting as a model for it himself. (Henrik Ibsen)
An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. (Washington Irving)
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? (Henry James)
Every man has three characters – that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has. (Alphonse Karr)
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. (Helen Keller)
I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers. (Paul Klee)
Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense. (Diana Krall)
The true artist consciously enters character into his work. (A. C. Leighton)
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. (Abraham Lincoln)
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. (Walter Lippmann)
It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty. (James Russell Lowell)
Your character will be what you yourself choose to make it. (John Lubbock)
The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. (Thomas B. Macaulay)
The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist. (Eric Maisel)
Character is the indelible mark that determines the only true value of all people and all their work. (Orison Swett Marden)
It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Your success stops where your character stops. You can never rise above the limitations of your character. (John C. Maxwell)
Nothing can come out of the artist that is not in the man. (H. L. Mencken)
Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries. (James A. Michener)
Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation. (Maria Montessori)
Success is good for the character. (John Mortimer)
If you are going to be a big personality, you've got to have some kind of characteristic gimmick. (Farley Mowat)
A person is far more likely to appear to have sound character because he persistently follows his temperament than because he persistently follows his principles. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted. (Joyce Carol Oates)
Inspiration gets us to the easel and the work refines our character. (Leif Ostlund)
Character is much easier kept than recovered. (Thomas Paine)
Paint the essential character of things. (Camille Pissarro)
I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within. (Plautus)
Pride is the never-failing vice of fools. (Alexander Pope)
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business. (Alexander Pope)
Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
To have character is to be big enough to take life on. (M. C. Richards)
A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's. (Jean Paul Richter)
If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul. (Auguste Rodin)
Character isn't something you were born with and can't change, like your fingerprints. It's something you weren't born with and must take responsibility for forming. (Jim Rohn)
Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike. (Theodore Roosevelt)
Character is the firm foundation stone upon which one must build to win respect. Just as no worthy building can be erected on a weak foundation, so no lasting reputation worthy of respect can be built on a weak character. (R. C. Samsel)
One thinks like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. (May Sarton)
Everyone is like a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)
The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart. (Howard Simons)
It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word. (Philip Dormer Stanhope)
When you try to do one step forward to attain knowledge about the hidden truths, then do the same time three steps forward to perfect your character. (Rudolf Steiner)
There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new and old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things. (Wallace Stevens)
It is not a question so much of a 'tree like a figure' or a 'root like a figure' – it is a question of bringing out the anonymous personality of these things. (Graham Sutherland)
Noble character is best appreciated in those ages in which it can most readily develop. (Tacitus)
I am a simple vessel with complex overtones, opinionated on occasions but willing to listen. Comfortable with reclusiveness and devoted to privacy and family. Patriotic to a fault and allergic to cruelty, ignorance and bad music. (Bernie Taupin)
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. (Henry David Thoreau)
Character is the ability to follow through on a resolution long after the emotion with which it was made has passed. (Brian Tracy)
Deal honestly and objectively with yourself; intellectual honesty and personal courage are the hallmarks of great character. (Brian Tracy)
It becomes, therefore, the most important of all considerations with what character we invest in the Universal Mind; for since our relation to it is purely subjective it will infallibly bear to us exactly that character which we impress upon it; in other words it will be to us exactly what we believe it to be. (Thomas Troward)
It has been said that self-respect is the gate of heaven, and the most cursory observation shows that a degree of reserve adds vastly to the latent force of character. (Henry Theodore Tuckerman)
One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. (Mark Twain)
A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation. (Mark Twain)
Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. (Lao Tzu)
Men's maxims reveal their characters. (Marquis de Vauvenargues)
Real character emerges in the way we meet our routine, everyday obligations. (Thomas J. Watson, Jr.)
I like the trees that have had a struggle... they're like people who have had to fight to live; they've developed character. (W. P. Weston)
True character arises from a deeper well than religion. (Edward O. Wilson)
If you clear your mind, you can fill it with your character. If it is cluttered, if it is anxious, if you're thinking about your date, about your dinner, about filling your refrigerator, there's no room. There's no room for the character you're trying to build. (Henry Winkler)
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