Character Quotes

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

Marquis de Sade

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

Arnold Toynbee

Watch your thoughts they become words. Watch your words they become actions. Watch your actions they become habits. Watch your habits they become character. Watch your character it becomes your destiny.

Patrick Overton

What made the deepest impression upon you? inquired a friend one day of Lincoln, when you stood in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, the greatest of natural wonders? - - - - The thing that stuck me most forcibly when I saw the Falls, Lincoln responded with the characteristic deliberation, was where in the world did all that water come from?

Author Unknown

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Henry David Thoreau

Character is power.

Booker T. Washington

Our view... is that it is an essential characteristic of experimentation that it is carried out with limited resources, and an essential part of the subject of experimental design to ascertain how these should be best applied; or, in particular, to which causes of disturbance care should be given, and which ought to be deliberately ignored.

Sir Ronald A. Fishe

We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.

Ricthe

Knowledge is essential to conquest only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.

Anne Besant

Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.

Horace Mann

Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.

Elias Boudinot

Strong feelings do not necessarily make a strong character. The strength of a man is to be measured by the power of the feelings he subdues not by the power of those which subdue him.

William Carleton

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Henry David Thoreau

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal

Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commitment in the face of conflict produces character.

Unknown

The influence of individual character extends from generation to generation.

Macleod

Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately people shape their own characters.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Albert Einstein

Johnson himself turned out to be so many different characters he could have populated all of War and Peace and still had a few people left over.

Herbert Mitgang

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

H. Jackson Browne, P. S. I Love You

Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.

Euripides

Character is not made in a crisis it is only exhibited.

Rose Dorothy Freeman

Character is the indelible mark that determines the only true value of all people and all their work.

Orison Swett Marden

Character can not be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Helen Kelle

The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people.

Claiborne Pell

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

Samuel Johnson

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, Here comes number seventy - One!

Richard M. DeVos

Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

Henry Clay

Choose your friends by their character and your socks by their color. Choosing your socks by their character makes no sense, and choosing your friends by their color is unthinkable.

Anon.

Talents are best nurtured in solitude character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johann von Goethe

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

Hermann Hesse

To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.

W. Somerset Maugham