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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:

Character matters; leadership decends from character.

Rush Limbaugh

Now the real fruits of human nature – the arts, sciences, great enterprises, lofty conceptions, manly virtues – are due especially to the state of war. […] In a word, we can say that blood is the manure of the plant we call genius.

Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France (1796)

If the tumults of the eleventh century had taught the English anything, however, it was that a hereditary claim to power could easily be trumped by other factors. Violence was one, as the Vikings had shown. Virtue was another.

Marc Morris William I: England's Conqueror (2016)

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

Peter Ustinov BBC obituary (2004)

It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.
Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond; that character — not wealth or power or position — is of supreme worth.

John D. Rockefeller Jr.

You will form a very inadequate estimate of a man's character, if you judge by what a fond sister says of him. The worst of them generally know how to hide their misdeeds from their sisters' eyes, and their mother's, too.

Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Character is formed from the repeated choice of thoughts and action. Make the right choice - You shall have a firm and noble character.

Chinmayananda Saraswati

[T]he hero is usually a very dull, straightforward guy. He's got to be good.

Vincent Price

I believe there is one Supreme most perfect being. ... I believe He is pleased and delights in the happiness of those He has created; and since without virtue man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe He delights to see me virtuous.

Benjamin Franklin Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion (1728)

Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.

Irena Sendler

As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.

Samuel Adams The Rights of the Colonists (1772)

As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 301.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[T]here is in man a conscience as well as a consciousness, an ineradicable aspiration towards virtue, which is certainly no less difficult to understand.

Frederick Soddy Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

Charlie Chaplin My Autobiography (1964)

They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Paradoxically, by mastering oneself, one becomes more open to others, indirectly becoming generous, since “bonum est diffusivum sui”. This is magnanimity, the great ancient virtue whose name has been lost today. (p. 133)

Salvatore Natoli

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others.

Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)

There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.

Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross Statement as UK prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials (1945)

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.

Michel de Montaigne Essais (1571)

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