English Character Quotes

#1. The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

Samuel Butler

#2. It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.

Alexander Herzen

#3. With more insight into the English character, I poured out a stiff whisky and soda and placed it in front of the gloomy inspector.

Agatha Christie

#4. I always have tendency to form very strong local attachments, so I was very keen to find out about the school I was going to, its history, and the countryside. I was acquiring a kind of English character if you like, Englishness about things and my attitudes.

Ibn Warraq

#5. The strange thing about the English character is that they understate everything. It's considered bad form to comment on the food, money, romance, any of those things. So you underplay it.

Patrick Macnee

#6. The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.

Goldwin Smith

#7. In the English character, the "give and take" policy, the business principle of the trader, is principally inherent.

Swami Vivekananda

#8. The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.

Neville Weston

#9. The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

Zadie Smith

#10. The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.

Elizabeth George

#11. This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

Arthur Golden

#12. One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe

Tom Turner

#13. Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?

Goldwin Smith

#14. I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.

Jeremy Corbyn

#15. I - and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do - have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.

Douglas Hyde

#16. Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.

Pete Earley

#17. You don't have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

Jonathan Lethem

#18. German football is like English football. The Germans and the English do not play like a Brazilian side. They have to improve, bring up their young players, who have character.

Franz Beckenbauer

#19. There wasn't a single good character in 'Titanic' who was English and this is typical.

David Warner

#20. When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

G.K. Chesterton

#21. Harrison Ford - one of my favorite actors - has a wonderful sense of character and depth and uniqueness to him, yet he's able to just deliver the lines without putting any English on it.

Thomas Jane

#22. About GreenHollyWood who is this character?? My English teacher a fat guy about 30 or 35 years old with Glasses and short Hair.

Deyth Banger

#23. I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.

Thomas Jefferson

#24. The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

Peter Ackroyd

#25. Tanner: My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people's necessities.

George Bernard Shaw

#26. I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

Alan Bennett

#27. The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.

Rupert Everett

#28. In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

Ellen Glasgow

#29. I disliked singing in English and neither liked the story nor the character of Cressida.

Walter Legge

#30. The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

G.K. Chesterton

#31. I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

Allegra Huston

#32. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

George Orwell