Quotes about character

Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.

Character is destiny.

"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him lasting forever."

It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.

Hardships make or break people.

...soldierly simplicity of character that has always represented the military at its best. In the higher ranks it is different. The higher a man is placed, the broader his point of view. Different interests and a wide variety of passions, good and bad, will arise on all sides. Envy and generosity, pride and humility, wrath and compassion - all may appear as effective forces in this great drama.

Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.

No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.

What we say is similar to what we are.

"Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms."

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call “temperament.”