Only Virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.
Character Quotes
Anyone else on this page has about a third as many entries as Shakespeare. Next come Pope, Milton, James Russell Lowell and Goethe. The sentence worth reading in context is Emerson’s, from The American Scholar (1837): character is higher than intellect, and a great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
Shaw, in Man and Superman (1903), is here for a remark about marriage and morality, which shows how loosely the page’s topic is applied.
Three entries are flagged. Two sayings credited to the Roman mime-writer Publilius Syrus, one about character deciding every man’s fortune and one about doing nothing at once both hastily and prudently, are disputed. A passage credited to Joseph Addison, about imperfection being what complains of the imperfect, is marked misattributed.
But a perverse temper and fretful disposition make any state of life unhappy.
Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.
He, full of bashfulness and truth, loved much, hoped little, and desired naught.
Be this thy brazen bulwark, to keep a clear conscience, and never turn pale with guilt.
Prudence is the knowledge of things to be sought, and those to be shunned.
Virtue cannot be separated into male and female. ... The difference is one of bodies not of souls.
He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.