Top 100 Human Character Quotes
#1. There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and
Aristotle.
#2. When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.
Julia Alvarez
#3. I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.
Robert Duvall
#4. Character is the colossal hope of human improvement within and without.
Sri Chinmoy
#5. Basically, every character I've ever played, I've based entirely on internal conflict. And I love doing that, because I think it's very human.
James McAvoy
#6. I don't have paparazzi following me. Because I'm a human character, it's different. The vampires get a lot of attention, and then the werewolves, and then the humans. It hasn't really changed that much for me.
Tinsel Korey
#7. There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind
Noam Chomsky
#8. While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland.
George Combe
#9. Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
Sue Monk Kidd
#10. [Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.
Aristophanes
#11. the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form.
Guy Debord
#12. As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.
Hugo Weaving
#13. I think I enjoy playing human beings no matter the substance of their character.
Ezra Miller
#14. The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
Augustus William Hare
#15. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#16. I've always played very human sort of characters.
Michael Caine
#17. When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.
E. Stanley Jones
#18. Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.
Louise J. Kaplan
#19. The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Quentin Crisp
#20. Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
#21. When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people.
Tom Hughes
#22. Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
Orson Scott Card
#23. Basically, I think that there are some characters that you can just allow the truth of your character as a human being in your real life to come through.
Edward James Olmos
#24. The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.
Edward Thorndike
#25. I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body.
Thomas Koerfer
#26. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard Shaw
#27. The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity to take such a stand is what makes us human beings.
Viktor E. Frankl
#29. What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.
George Herbert Mead
#30. The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
Leon Trotsky
#31. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character.
Aaron Sorkin
#32. I enjoy playing real human beings after playing a lot of larger than life characters. I love playing true to life characters and that is what I intend to do for the majority of my career.
Michael Jai White
#33. Karate aims to build character, improve human behavior, and cultivate modesty; it does not, however, guarantee it.
Yasuhiro Konishi
#34. If it's strictly comedy, I like to bring some darkness to it. If it's strictly drama, I always like to lighten it up as well. I like to find some kind of dimension and make my characters human, so that it doesn't feel like a sketch and feels more like a slice of life.
Nestor Carbonell
#35. A character, their ability or inability to laugh at themselves should always be a very, very conscious choice. It's a very big key to the nature of a human being.
Grant Bowler
#36. Character of any person is the aggregate of his or her conscientious tendencies - the sum total of the knacks of the civilized part of the mind.
Abhijit Naskar
#37. One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
Aldous Huxley
#38. Every thing in human character goes to wreck, under the reign of procrastination, while prompt action gives to all things a corresponding and proportional life and energy.
William Alcott
#39. There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.
Silvia Cartwright
#40. Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
E. M. Forster
#41. Character, courage, industry and perseverance are the four pillars on which the whole edifice of human life can be built and failure is a word unknown to me.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
#42. That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
Howard Nemerov
#43. But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.
Bill Griffith
#44. The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#45. Man is a logical machine run by the scoundrels of emotions.
Raheel Farooq
#46. With the tone of the show, like a lot of the films, the Marvel creative team has found a way to bridge really exciting stuff that has real stakes. They balance some of the action stuff that the fans of the comics really want to see with characters that people can relate to and who are very human.
Clark Gregg
#47. A great and frequent error in our judgment of human nature is to suppose that those sentiments and feelings have no existence, which may be only for a time concealed. The precious metals are not found at the surface of the earth, except in sandy places.
Arthur Helps
#48. The world needs the kind of education by means of which character is formed, strength of the mind is increased and the human intellect is expanded beyond its own limits.
Abhijit Naskar
#49. know the law of human nature: acts produce habits, habits breed dispositions, dispositions form the will, and the rightly-formed will is character.
Andrew Murray
#50. I think the greatest of all human virtues is loyalty. It embraces all the best of the human character: courage, faith, love and charity.
Douglas Bader
#51. It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#52. We all do things in a certain individual way, according to our temperaments.
Every human act - no matter how large or how small - is a direct expression of
a man's personality, and bears the inevitable impress of his nature.
S. S. Van Dine
#54. Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.
Thomas Hardy
#55. If you wear a mask for too long, it becomes a part of your character.
Eraldo Banovac
#56. The cold, commercial word 'market' disguises its human character - a market is a collection of our aspirations, exertions, choices and desires.
Rupert Murdoch
#57. Let us respect the unique character and the personal world of each and every human being
Masami Saionji
#58. My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character's fate depended on human actions, his and others.
Paul Kalanithi
#59. The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen
Milan Kundera
#60. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#62. Character is the backbone of our human culture. Music is the flowering of character.
Confucius
#63. There's a whole element of human interaction and character interaction that I really enjoy doing.
Orlando Bloom
#64. The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
Lin Yutang
#65. Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature; such as the beauty of sentiments, the grace of actions, the turn of characters, and the proportions and features of a human mind.
Anthony Ashley Cooper
#66. Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office-seeking. Men of good character and impulses are betrayed by it into all sorts of meanness.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#68. Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training, or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life.
Samuel Smiles
#69. The question of the position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one another.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#70. Every woman is a character - but people need to see I'm a regular human. It's like you wear a pink wig and you're no longer human all of sudden.
Nicki Minaj
#71. Many aspects of the human condition are beautiful and many others are vile. Betrayal and personal agony represent a maddening part of being human. A person can maintain personal dignity by exercising restraint, remaining true to their conscience, and preserving under difficult conditions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#72. Accurate and questioning dramatic and written narratives that expose true human character, is the necessary glue of any intelligent, enduring and compassionate society.
Yon Walls
#73. The structure of human betterment cannot be built upon foundations of materialism or business, but upon the bedrock of individual character in free men and women.
Herbert Hoover
#74. It's really interesting that, in 'The Avengers,' the character that people relate to is The Hulk, and I think the reason why they relate to The Hulk is because he's fragile and human and faulty.
Chris Pine
#75. A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.
Rob Reiner
#76. Somerset Maugham said that it took at least six human beings to make one fictional character. That is true of landscape as well, I think. We have to make our landscapes, change streets, create new turnings, rebuild or tear down, change time, and even nature, if need be.
Mary Lee Settle
#77. When I look at jobs, one of the most relevant questions I ask is, 'Is this something I've done before, or is it a chance to experience a new context, tone and relationship?' I also ask if it's a story worth telling and a character with a reason to exist ... someone who reflects the human condition.
Rose McIver
#78. I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter
Virginia Woolf
#79. Fateful encounters with a cruel world reveal our character. No human is immune from heartbreaking loss. Regardless of our socioeconomic status, eventually everybody shall suffer a grievous personal loss, a body blow that inflicts pain of inexpressible magnitude.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#80. Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.
Justin Cronin
#81. I abominate war as Unchristian. I hold it the greatest of human crimes. I deem it to involve all others,
violence, blood, rapine, fraud; everything that can deform the character, alter the nature, and debase the name of man.
Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux
#82. I love ... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.
Jake Busey
#83. I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.
Henry Fairfield Osborn
#84. Only through delayed gratification could you be able to come up with other virtues, character, trait that will really qualify you to call yourself a human being.
Sunday Adelaja
#85. Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.
Philip Jose Farmer
#86. It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost. In war it is extraordinary how it all comes down to the character of one man.
Creighton W. Abrams Jr.
#87. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
Siri Hustvedt
#88. There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable.
Herman Melville
#89. Our human landscape is overburdened with competitions and contests. Art need not be a contest. Art is a personal quest for quality. Quality is the forerunner of acceptance. Character is the forerunner of quality. Be your own discriminating connoisseur.
Robert Genn
#90. Changing the form of one's mission's almost as difficult as changing the shape of one's nose: there they are, each, in the middle of one's face and one's character
one has to begin too far back.
Henry James
#91. Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.
L. P. Jacks
#92. Good is good and bad is bad, and nowhere is the difference between good and bad so wide and so fateful as in human character. For character makes destiny in the individual and in the race.
Edward O. Sisson
#93. The Bible stands alone in human literature in its elevated conception of manhood, in character and conduct.
Henry Ward Beecher
#94. Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.
Stephen King
#96. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
Andrew O'Hagan
#97. No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
Samuel Johnson
#98. Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.
Saul Bellow
#99. The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Alfred De Vigny
#100. I'm not super-comfortable with it. I feel the less you project of yourself the more you can be believable as a character. I also think it's just better for your own mental health. Then you can be a human being and change your mind and nobody asks you questions about it!
Evelyne Brochu
