Motivational Quotes

Character

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

- Angelou, Maya

Best Quotes about Character

The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.

Voltaire

Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.

Sivananda, Sri Swami

Talents are best nurtured in solitude. Character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The higher character a person supports the more they should regard their smallest actions.

Character matters; leadership descends from character.

Limbaugh, Rush

You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.

Goldsmith, Oliver

Clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.

Proverb, Chinese

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

If an ass goes traveling it will not come home a horse.

Proverb

10.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house --in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

Miller, Arthur

11.

The highest qualities of character must be earned.

Abbott, Lyman

12.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Lebowitz, Fran

14.

Clothes don't tell the character of the man, but they just as well talk for him as against him.

15.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

Pity the man who has a character to support --it is worse than a large family -- he is silent poor indeed.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua

18.

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principles.

Hume, David

19.

Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.

Frankfurter, Felix

20.

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.

Lowell, James Russell

21.

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Abraham Lincoln

22.

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

23.

Some people are born hammers, others anvils.

Proverb

24.

You must look into people, as well as at them.

Chesterfield, Lord

25.

While an original is always hard to find, he is easy to recognize.

Mason, John L.

26.

Character develops itself in the stream of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

James, William

28.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

Maritain, Jacques

29.

I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself.

Peter The Great

30.

The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

31.

Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.

Gardner, Ava

32.

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate -- to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.

Jefferson, Thomas

33.

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.

34.

Few people can distinguish the genuinely good from the reverse.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

35.

For character too is a process and an unfolding... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

Eliot, George

36.

You can tell the character of every man when you see how he receives praise.

Seneca

37.

You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

38.

Character is the sum and total of a person's choices.

Fitzwater, P. B.

39.

When about to commit a base deed, respect thyself, though there is no witness.

Ausonius, Decimus Magnus

40.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

Horace

41.

An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; A villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards, himself his own dungeon.

Pandita, Saskya

42.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

Hermann Hesse

43.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Angelou, Maya

44.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose.

Bulger, William M.

46.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

Churchill, Winston

47.

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

Strindberg, J. August

48.

A man's character is the reality of himself; his reputation, the opinion others have formed about him; character resides in him, reputation in other people; that is the substance, this is the shadow.

Beecher, Henry Ward

49.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Shakespeare, William

50.

If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.

Maurois, Andre