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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.

Random quote on Character

Most quoted on character:

Each wrong act brings with it its own anaesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

Rose Macaulay

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

Patrice Lumumba

Half the miseries of humankind’s history have originated in those who think they see in the fellow next to them virtues and vices that exist only in the mind of the beholder.

Matthew Hughes Hespira (2009)

Influence follows close upon the heels of character; and whatever we are, that we shall in the end be acknowledged to be.

Caroline Healey Dall

We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution.

Edmund Burke Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

Virtue, if not in action, is a vice,
And, when we move not forward, we go backward.

Philip Massinger

To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.

Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions (1973)

The truly wise man is he who loves virtue for its own sake.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

A politics of conscience is still yet possible. And yes….love will prevail.

Marianne Williamson

You cannot drag a man's conscience before any tribunal, and no one is answerable for his religious opinions to any power on earth.

Napoleon Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

The good conscience is an invention of the devil.

Albert Schweitzer Kulturphilosophie (1923)

We cannot speak of [civil] rights without centering our attention on [the moral compass of] conscience, one among a few distinctive features that make humans human‒and humane.

Marco Respinti

True happiness can only be found in the paths of virtue.

Nikolay Karamzin

They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators.' No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.

Hillary Clinton

The only Real Control is the discipline of the senses to abstain from indulgence in low desires, which alone ensures absolute purity of character.

Meher Baba Discourses (1967)

Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imaginative) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.

Simone Weil Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)

A clear conscience doesn’t mean anything if you haven’t any conscience.

William Feather Featherisms (2008)

But now Apsalar was trying to tell him that competence was not justification. That necessity demanded its own path and there was no virtue to be found at its heart.

Steven Erikson House of Chains (2002)

The political jokes people tell each other in private represent the conscience of the silent majority, and show us just how rotten are the foundations of post-totalitarian rule among the general public.

Liu Xiaobo

In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience to our dealing;
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing will continue stealing.

James Russell Lowell

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