Character Quotes

Truth needs wisdom's guidance. Wisdom prevents a hard truth from getting the best of you when an imperfect character brings out the worst in you.

~ Stella Payton

Love not only transform your mental and emotional character/attitude, it also shifts your physical being, which goes thru subtle changes also. Love is POWERFUL! God is love.

~ Pazaria Smith

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Don't seek to be respected by everyone, rather seek to be worthy of being respected by everyone.

~ Bohdi Sanders

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

~ Anne Michaels

Why don't you try something really different and be the same person two days in a row?

~ Reba

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

~ Edith Wharton

Create a character with an obsession, then follow.

~ Ray Bradbury

If we lose our significance (character) we fall in ruin. The exploiters take over and sell freedom from fear, from guilt, from want. They excuse all corrupt actions. Collective status degenerates the human spirit.

~ Moxie Will

True beauty is a beautiful character shinning through.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

Stay alert! Don’t let someone’s words blind you from their behavior... They can say all the right things, they can make you feel things you've never felt before, but don't be fooled; their actions will reveal their true character, desires, and priorities. Behavior speaks; pay attention to what it tells you. Behavior is math; pay attention to what it reveals.

~ Steve Maraboli

I like you. Therefore I will decorate you with qualities you don't have.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

When i was younger, one piece of advice from a mentor stuck with me for years....When shaking someones hand make sure its strong and confident. For 1st impressions last and your character is automatically assumed in that one second of greeting...

~ Daleen Van Tonder

When everything seems to be lacking integrity, you find it in yourself.

~ Madam Secretary

Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.

~ Thomas Hardy

Call me a Freak all u want really...I honestly take it as a compliment everytime. No matter how it was intended.

~ Daleen Van Tonder

To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

~ David Brooks

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed

~ David Brooks

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.

~ David Brooks

The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.

~ David Brooks

Vision and purpose fix our character.

~ Kishore Bansal

If your paramount concern in life is to make sure everyone likes and approves of you, you’re going to find yourself running in circles for the rest of your life.

~ Ali B. Moe

If you put yourself in the emotion that you want from others, you are more likely to receive it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination...

~ Marcel Proust

Reputation is made in a moment, Character is built over a lifetime.

~ Elizabeth George

It is neither trials nor relationships nor successes nor failures that define a man, but the choices he makes while handling them.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to pass as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If your paramount concern in life is to make sure everyone likes and approves of you, I’m sorry to say you’re going to find yourself running in circles for the rest of your life.

~ Ali B. Moe

Be a peacemaker but never at the expense of your character or God’s standards.

~ Jim George

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

~ Marcel Proust

Wills aren't really strong or weak, it is the characters that they express and serve that are.

~ William H. Gass

The only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.

~ James Carlos Blake

After all, hadn't she been the one to pursue him? And Madame Dupuy had done it with a vigor that most women would have been too ashamed to display.

~ Rose Wynters

You don't have to be beautiful to be shallow. You needn't be small or weak to be a coward. Shitty personalities come in surprising packages and anybody can be an asshole. So value the good ones, whoever they are. Recognize them when you see them and don't let them go.

~ Jennifer Delucy

The actions of our closest friends say a lot about our character—what we overlook, what we contribute to and what is important to us when the world doesn’t take notice.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Some women don't care what you can do for them. They care about what you could make of them in the inside.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Your behavior is the testimony of your character.

~ Saru Singhal

She built her character with the adversity she had faced, so she could live the best of her life for the rest of life.

~ Nikki Rowe

If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.

~ George Bernard Shaw