Top 100 Our Character Quotes
#1. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#2. The love for our native land strengthens our individual and national character.
Alexander Hamilton
#3. 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
#4. We have an obligation to ourselves to foster the environment that allows for our self-actualization. Rather than my gifts serving me, I must serve them. I want to be a steward of the best aspects of my character and assist them in their fulfillment through proper discipline and habits.
Chris Matakas
#5. It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.
Alberto Moravia
#6. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and so is our character.
Billy Graham
#7. All of us have schnozzles ... if not in our faces, then in our character, minds or habits. When we admit our schnozzles, instead of defending them, we begin to laugh, and the world laughs with us.
Jimmy Durante
#8. What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.
John Stuart Mill
#9. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...
Walter Benjamin
#10. I prefer to doubt everything. Such a disposition does not preclude a resolute character. On the contrary, as far as I am concerned, I always advance more boldly when I don't know what is waiting me for me. After all, nothing worse than death can happen-and death you can't escape!
Mikhail Lermontov
#11. We can't control the impressions others form about us, and the effort to do so only debases our character.
Epictetus
#12. California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.
J.B. Priestley
#13. Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.
Meredith Vieira
#14. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
#15. Discipline is training that corrects and perfects our mental faculties or molds our moral character. Discipline is control gained by enforced obedience. It is the deliberate cultivation of inner order.
Charles R. Swindoll
#16. Our words reveal our thoughts; our manners mirror our self-esteem; our actions reflect our character; our habits predict the future.
William Arthur Ward
#17. Problems never just go away or take care of themselves, especially when God allows them in order to shape our character. God will patiently wait and allow the circumstances to compel us to do what we should have done at the beginning: surrender all control to God.
Wayne Stiles
#18. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. There
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.
Uri Avnery
#20. I think we all suffer from guilt at some point in our lives, but for the most part I never really regret, and I try to always remain positive. Yes, I think that those issues are very interesting to play in a character, and they're prominent issues in life, and I think people can relate to them.
Channing Tatum
#21. Temptation yielded to is lust deified (My Utmost for His Highest, September 17 entry). Temptation comes in many forms, but it is always personal, uncannily tailor-made for our individual moral weakness, and it takes aim at God's character, seeking to ransack our faith.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
#22. We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.
Barbara Kopple
#24. It is a rare American who does not have some story about how music has made our lives richer and more interesting, how it has changed our moods, brought out the best in our character and even sometimes helped us earn a living.
Lamar Alexander
#25. We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
William Shakespeare
#26. The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.
Stephen Vizinczey
#27. My husband doesn't like to fly. He does fly now because he doesn't want our daughter to grow up thinking he is a Don Knotts character. But when we were first married, he didn't fly.
Tina Fey
#28. In our parts such characters sometimes turn up that, however many years ago you met them, you can never recall them without an inner trembling.
Nikolai Leskov
#29. We are poor in character when we think getting by is a substitute for doing our best.
Marvin J. Ashton
#30. It is a strength of character to acknowledge our failings and our strong points, and it is a weakness of character not to remain in harmony with both the good and the bad that is within us.
Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...
#31. We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please. That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#32. The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters.
Oswald Chambers
#33. Part of our goal, in the episodes moving forward, is to deepen and dimensionalize every other character, to get into their relationships with each other, expand that stuff and really sink our teeth in.
Josh Gad
#34. Not only has wilderness been a force in molding our character as a people, but its influence continues, and will, if we are wise enough to preserve it on this continent, be a stabilizing power as well as a spiritual reserve for the future.
Sigurd F. Olson
#35. It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#36. So much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular and consequential character.
Lord Chesterfield
#37. The actions of our closest friends say a lot about our character - what we overlook, what we contribute to and what is important to us when the world doesn't take notice.
Shannon L. Alder
#38. Economic power is not the same as strength of national character. Our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit.
Richard M. Nixon
#39. The very essence of politeness is to take care that by our words and actions we make other people pleased with us as well as with themselves.
Jean De La Bruyere
#40. Virtues are the internal qualities that allow us to be our best selves and enable us to lead complete and fulfilling lives.
Jonathan V. Last
#41. In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.
George W. Bush
#43. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny - but how we relate to what happens.
Lama Surya Das
#44. This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin Yutang
#45. You're an excellent judge of character, Sarene - except your own. Often our own opinions of ourselves are the most unrealistic.
Brandon Sanderson
#46. Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues."
P. J. O'Rourke
#48. Surely, 'tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him soso here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the characterof generosity and virtue.
Laurence Sterne
#49. Response is what we have trained ourselves to be; it is a reflection of our manhood, character, ideals. We cannot always control our surface reactions, but we can sit at the helm of our lives and control our responses to the blows of life.
Wilferd Peterson
#50. I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.
Adrian Tomine
#51. The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Charles Darwin
#52. Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
John Ruskin
#53. It's strange to look back over a full season. Our characters have accrued all these memories, but so have we, the actors. And sometimes the character memories and the actor memories bleed into each other.
Josh Radnor
#54. The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people.
Claiborne Pell
#55. Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate tolay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.
Henry David Thoreau
#58. Our circumstances are not an accurate reflection of God's goodness. Whether life is good or bad, God's goodness, rooted in His character, is the same.
Helen Grace Lescheid
#59. 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
#60. One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
#61. Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day.
Ronald Reagan
#62. I think it's really important to depict complex, flawed LGBT characters, because we are all connected by our humanity.
Kit Williamson
#63. 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
#64. After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.
Edward Hopper
#65. I started my career in Portugal, and the longest I've ever played a character was for about a year, which is how long our TV shows last.
Daniela Ruah
#66. Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.
Paul Brunton
#67. One's character is one's habitual way of behaving. We all have patterns of behavior or habits, and often we are quite unaware of them. When Socrates urged us to Know thyself, he clearly was directing us to come to know our habitual ways of responding to the world around us.
Thomas Lickona
#68. Sound character is our greatest asset because it provides the power with which we may ride the emergencies of life instead of going down under them.
Napoleon Hill
#69. It is not the events in our life that define our character, but how we deal with them.
Eric Heiden
#70. We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.
Lisa Zunshine
#71. For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.
Benjamin Franklin
#72. Becoming a Leader of Character changes lives - our lives and the lives of the people we touch.
Dave Anderson
#73. The sea has been called deceitful and treacherous, but there lies in this trait only the character of a great natural power, which, to speak according to our own feelings, renews its strength, and, without reference to joy or sorrow, follows eternal laws which are imposed by a higher Power.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#74. 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
#75. Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?
Nicholas Sparks
#76. Character halts without aid of the imagination, which our classes in Shakespeare and Browning, music and drawing, recognize not only as amusement and by-play of the mind, but a co-ordinate power. Its work is unhappily styled fiction; for to idealize is to realize.
C. A. Bartol
#77. With courage and character, American soldiers continue to put themselves on the line to defend our freedom, and so many have paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Dan Lipinski
#78. I really wanted our male characters to be a lot stronger. We gave them careers, lives.
Catherine Hardwicke
#79. We knew before we came (to earth) that there would be many adverse circumstances to test us: accidents, sickness, and disease to prove us; temptations and distractions to try us; disappointments, discouragements, reverses, failures and all kinds of situations to determine our character.
Robert E. Wells
#80. Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
George Santayana
#81. My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do."
"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea.
George Eliot
#82. Reputation is what people expect us to do next. It's their expectation of the quality and character of the next thing we produce or say or do.
We control our actions (even when it feels like we don't) and our actions over time (especially when we think no one is looking) earn our reputation.
Seth Godin
#83. We never plant trees in other people's yard and hope them to grow. We plant them in ours, water them and take care of them. We should do the same with our lives. Never lay it on others.
Saru Singhal
#84. Our busy lives force us to focus on things we do from day to day. But the development of character comes only as we focus on who we really are.
Russell M. Nelson
#85. A long time ago, I learned not to go up to the boss and ask what's happening to my character. I haven't done that for 20 years, since I was on 'Days of Our Lives.'
Michael Easton
#86. It is nice that we finished the game today. At the end we finished the series with a convincing victory against Bangladesh. We came here without some key players but I must say our young players showed a lot of characters in the series which will help Sri Lanka cricket in the future.
Mahela Jayawardene
#87. How in the end can one possibly hold anyone responsible for our own underdeveloped visions, or undeveloped strength of character?
Ruth St. Denis
#88. Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for the erasure of the blot from our Republican character.
James Madison
#89. A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims and energies.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#90. Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They have made the giants of our race by giving Titanic muscles, brawny sinews, and far-reaching intellects.
Orison Swett Marden
#91. We're all the heroes of our own stories. So, when I am inside the head of a character who would otherwise be considered a villain, I have a great deal of affection for that character and I'm trying to see the world and the events through their eyes.
George R R Martin
#92. You speak of the good conduct of your ancestors. As your own conduct is under discussion, and not theirs, I cannot see how their former good character can at all serve your present purpose. Fortunately for our country, every man stands upon his own merit.
Stephen Decatur
#93. 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
#94. If taxes are laid upon us without our having a legal representation where they are laid, we are reduced from the character of free subjects to the state of tributary slaves.
Samuel Adams
#95. Jesus, our elder brother, was begotten in the flesh by the same character that was in the garden of Eden, and who is our Father in Heaven.
Brigham Young
#96. 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
#97. We're all products of our past," Devon said. "What we choose to do with it is our decision, no one else's. You can choose to be damaged, fragile. Or you can choose to be more than the broken elements of your psyche. Fire tempers steel. Pain tempers character.
Tiffany Snow
#98. We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#99. Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining its character. On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society.
Hilaire Belloc
#100. Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.
Henry David Thoreau
