quotations about character
It is an error to suppose that no man understands his own character. Most persons know even their failings very well, only they persist in giving them names different from those usually assigned by the rest of the world; and they compensate for this mistake by naming, at first sight, with singular accuracy, those very same failings in others.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Character, like wine or cold tea in a bottle, takes its shape from the environment.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Every character is in some respects uniform, and in others inconsistent; and it is only by the study both of the uniformity and inconsistency, and a comparison of them with each other, that the knowledge of man is acquired.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
One who stultifies his own character in desperate attempts to please everybody is called a "Gentleman."
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
We become familiar with the outsides of men, as with the outsides of houses, and think we know them, while we are ignorant of so much that is passing within them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Perhaps the natural character of a man may be best seen before breakfast. The world is created anew for us every morning, and he is just then reissued, as it were, from the hands of nature, with all his original peculiarities fresh upon him.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Measure for Measure
'Tis from high Life high Characters are drawn.
ALEXANDER POPE
Moral Essays
There are often two characters of a man--that which is believed in by people in general, and that which he enjoys among his associates. It is supposed, but vainly, that the latter is always a more accurate approximation to the truth, whereas in reality it is often a part which he performs to admiration: while the former is the result of certain minute traits, certain inflexions of voice and countenance, which cannot be discussed, but are felt as it were instinctively by his domestics and by the outer world. The impressions arising from these slight circumstances he is able to efface from the minds of his constant companions, or from habit they have ceased to observe them.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
And so it becomes perfectly clear that in the heavenly country, where all character is like a crystal sea, everybody can see to the bottom of everybody, and everybody finds delight in the transparency, because in that country there is unlimited human communion, and no one harbors anything which he wants to have concealed.
DR. JOWETT
Continent, January 4, 1917
The tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Men love to contradict their general character. Thus a man is of a gloomy and suspicious temperament, is deemed by all morose, and ere long finds out the general opinion. He then suddenly deviates into some occasional acts of courtesy. Why? Not because he ought, not because his nature is changed; but because he dislikes being thoroughly understood. He will not be the thing whose behaviour on any occasion the most careless prophet can with certainty foretell.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The difficulty of repairing character tempts men sometimes to neglect it; and the ease with which it is at other times established, is the true reason of its frequent default.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Concerning character, we sometimes judge of the whole by its parts.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Character is largely the result of the kind and quality of seed-thoughts one entertains in consciousness and transmits to the subconscious mind.
WALTER MATTHEWS
Human Life from Many Angles
It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.
LORD ACTON
The Study of History
My road must be through Character to Power: I will try no other course, and I am sanguine enough to believe that this course, though not perhaps the quickest, is the surest.
LORD CANNING
attributed, Fraser's Magazine, November 1859