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.
In common things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.
He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.
Unless the gods deceive my mind,
That man is forging fetters for himself.
The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those which we affect to have.
As we can, according to the old saying, when we can not, as we would.