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.
The clearest indication of character is what people find laughable.
There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.
The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.
Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
There is no evil which we cannot face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded.
Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.