Quotes about Character

"People of character do the right thing, not because they think it will change the world but because they refuse to be changed by the world. Just as those who truly love do so because they refuse to change the essence of who they truly are."

No one can look either our planet or our societies in the face and imagine humans are in any respect as rational as they have been mass-bamboozled into believing that they are. All the abstractions in terms of which we "think" about ourselves are free-floating and autonomous conformisms and orthodoxies, irrationalist self-complacencies and self-flattery that manifest the disconnectivity and dissociativity typifying banauseia; we will continue past the several points-of-no-return imagining in abstracto that, of course, we must necessarily possess the faculties to reverse any mistaken policies and cure any destruction. But the problem does not lie ultimately anywhere outside our own intrinsic and self-biased idiotia, our primordial and primally blind characters. To have a character blithely oblivious to the nature and concept of one's character is the doom of the vast majority of "mankind."

what molds a persons specific character is most often determined by what the person initially consents to take in and give out

We believe profoundly in silence—the sign of a perfect equilibrium.
Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit.
Those who can preserve their selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the
storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; not a
ripple upon the shining pool—those, in the mind of the person of
nature, possess the ideal attitude and conduct of life.
If you ask us, `What is silence?' we will answer, `It is the
Great Mystery. The holy silence is God's voice.'
If you ask, `What are the fruits of silence?' we will
answer, `They are self-control, true courage of endurance, patience,
dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.'

Unfortunately for me, intentions don't build character; action does.
--Me.

Greek culture understands the key to understanding nature, instinct and organism as consisting in the endowment of each creature with some distinctive "excellence" or talent (arete).  Among humans there is great controversy whether (because of the diversity among different character-types and the clash of different political and philosophical perspectives) there is at all such a unitary, universal or congruent thing as "excellence" for man per se.  There are many aspectival or specialized excellences; but does man in general have a defining purpose or a metaphysically obligatory excellence that everyone, just insofar as he is human, is obligated to cultivate and pursue?  --Or do we have a problem here in trying to extend the term "human" to creatures who really have little substantial in common with one another?

(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive:  they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle.  If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.

The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.

I think we've been choosing boards of directors and many wrong leaders for the wrong reason. We choose people for their image, their charisma, their style and we should be choosing them for their integrity, for their character, and their substance.

 "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."

Character is like a tree and reputation is like a shadow, the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

"Man needs now no more degrees, but character,
No more study, but wisdom."

Be.
Virtuous.
Full of character.
Present at all times.
Visible, to those who know.
Whole, Living in Spirit, Loving, and In Service.
Friendships based only in expansion and deepening of Spirit.
For Love that has any other purpose ends, absent of anything real.

~Danielle Marie Crume

I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously “present,” an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Character is who you are when no one is watching.

"Their gunnin' for me, want to see me fall, you know my story, been through it all, times I felt like dyin', but I ain't cryin',  what didn't kill me, makes me strong as iron."

Eudaimonia is natural fatalism, the self-destiny of character--daimones being traditionally the lowest-order divinities, steering us to our unknown ends.  Sometimes disaster befalls us because we veer from our own intrinsic good sense; sometimes it occurs because we have followed our own intrinsic good sense but this is rooted in an ultimately or obscurely dysdaimonic character.  Tragedy is not always the result of a "mistake"; or sometimes the mistake lies in what we are, not what we do.  Unlike mere misfortune or chance, tragedy is rooted in primal actions and preconceptions of our character.  Petty-souled individuals (micropsychia) are unlikely to bring tragedy on themselves; in a way, they already are tragic beings normally and all of the time.  Only ambitious and self-driving individuals of great soul (megalopsychia) bring on themselves the risk of tragedy in its truest form, a radical overstepping of bounds.

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

Our inner strengths, experiences, and truths cannot be lost, destroyed, or taken away. Every person has an inborn worth and can contribute to the human community. We all can treat one another with dignity and respect, provide opportunities to grow toward our fullest lives and help one another discover and develop our unique gifts. We each deserve this and we all can extend it to others.

Crisis doesn't create character; it reveals it.

What you quickly and easily release tells more about your character than what you hold.

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?

"Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character."

I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact. I am, as it were, the created creating--a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.

Ignorance isn't bliss, just another form of stupidity.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.

If you have assumed a character above your strength, you have both acted in this matter in an unbecoming way, and you have neglected that which you might have fulfilled.

Cultivate these, then, for they are wholly within your power: sincerity and dignity; industriousness; and sobriety. Avoid grumbling, be frugal, considerate, and frank; be temperate in manner and speech; carry yourself with authority.

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is the perfection of character.