Character Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

G. K. Chesterton

Noble character is best appreciated in those ages in which it can most readily develop.

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

Of Winston Churchill and his son, Randolph Churchill:

A rather cheap character [similar to his father in displaying] levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.

Theodore Roosevelt

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.

Thomas Jefferson

The prosperity of a country depends, not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its fortifications, nor on the beauty of its public buildings; but it consists in the number of its cultivated citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment and character.

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man's true character, make him drunk.

My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining lights as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid? I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

Arthur Conan Doyle

We have divided the Virtues of the Soul into two groups, the Virtues of the Character and the Virtues of the Intellect.

Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.

Arthur Schopenhauer

So far as the personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent, and so far as it is unconscious, it is indistinguishable from all those things that carry its projections...that is, symbols of the outside world and the cosmic symbols. These form the psychological basis for the conception of man as a macrocosm through the astrological components of his character.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.

There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold.

William Shakespeare

In other words, character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual. We need intellect, and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character; but if we must choose between the two we choose character without a moment's hesitation.

Theodore Roosevelt

The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.

Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it.... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success.... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

Theodor W. Adorno

Nothing short of self-respect and that justice which is essential to a national character ought to involve us in war.

George Washington

Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency.
The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character…like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy.…The turkey…is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.

Benjamin Franklin

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition aspired, and success achieved.

We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all maters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.

George Washington