Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Character.
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.
Walter Lippmann
I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
James A. Michener
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Few people can distinguish the genuinely good from the reverse.
Juvenal
They attack the one man with their hate and their shower of weapons. But he is like some rock which stretches into the vast sea and which, exposed to the fury of the winds and beaten against by the waves, endures all the violence
Virgil
One can easily judge the character of a person by the way they treat people who can do nothing for them.
Proverb
Some people are born hammers, others anvils.
If an ass goes traveling it will not come home a horse.
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jelly beans.
Ronald Reagan
The circumstances amid which you life determine your reputation; the truth you believe determines your character. Reputation is what you are supposed to be; character is what you are. Reputation is the photograph; character is the face. Reputation comes over one from without; character grows up from within.Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community; character is what you have when you go away. Your reputation is learned in an hour; your character does not come to light for a year. Reputation is made in a moment; character is built in a lifetime. Reputation grows like a mushroom; character grows like the oak. A single newspaper report gives you your reputation; a life of toil gives you your character. Reputation makes you rich or makes you poor; character makes you happy or makes you miserable. Reputation is what men say about you on your tombstone; character is what angels say about you before the throne of God.
William Hersey Davis, (source un
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden
A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Virginia Woolf
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?
George Eliot
Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids
Aristotle
Character in a saint means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested.
Oswald Chambers
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
Mark Twain
A man's character is his guardian divinity.
Heraclitus
