Own 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. Part of the challenge of being a girl living in the 21st Century, looking back, the danger is to not judge your character by your own standards.

Zoe Kazan

#3. The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it.

Paul Newman

#4. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

Michael Gambon

#5. A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character ...

John Stuart Mill

#6. It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

Alberto Moravia

#7. He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#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 start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

Jim Jarmusch

#11. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Laura Linney

#12. It is the task of several months and it is a fact that a girl, either while rehearsing or actually playing, may be training for some character or feature in some future production not yet definitely fixed even in my own mind.

Florenz Ziegfeld

#13. When a man thinks he is reading the character of another, he is often unconsciously betraying his own.

Joseph P. Farrell

#14. Well you just have to own it, I suppose. Own the character, which is difficult.

David Wenham

#15. I've always been intrigued by cutout silhouettes. They are so intriguing, so poetic-the shadow of a soul. They tell everything about a character and they are open to be filled with one's own imagination.

Ann Demeulemeester

#16. Sometimes you need to put your own characteristics into the actor, and you take different things from the character that you admire - sometimes you can't see the boundaries anymore.

Bonnie Wright

#17. We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.

William Shakespeare

#18. Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

Eudora Welty

#19. A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.

Fennel Hudson

#20. It's depend of the communication, I think it's very important to let the director make his own vision of the character, not making a studio movie. Look the Dark Knight it's totally the vision of Nolan.

Xavier Gens

#21. Each guitar has its own character and personality, which can be magnified once the player engages in beatin' it up

Billy Gibbons

#22. 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

#23. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#24. ...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192

Jeff VanderMeer

#25. There's no better way to become a disintegrated character than to be your own authority.

Henry Cloud

#26. Weirdly enough, I don't like to pretend. I try to use things in me, and translate them into the situation and the characters, so it always needs to run through my own veins.

Noomi Rapace

#27. I try to bring elements of my own personality to every character I've played, but I think I'm pretty similar to the character I'm playing now. The biggest departure would have to have been Freaks and Geeks Sara, who was this sort of subordinate and shy girl.

Lizzy Caplan

#28. Bitterness will make you sick. During [Madiba's] imprisonment they were forced to work in the limestone quarry. Chipping away for no reason. Bitterness is the same. You reduce your own character with such a mindless exercise of cultivating bitterness.

Zelda La Grange

#29. You are the main character in the story of your life, but other people are the main characters of their own lives. And sometimes you can find healing just by playing a supporting role in someone else's experience.

Timothy Kurek

#30. My personal, metaphysical belief is Vedanta, which is that ultimately there is a singular consciousness. It's like a Hindu metaphysics, that basically we're all like characters in a play that consciousness is putting on to discover its own creative capacities.

Daniel Pinchbeck

#31. Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.

Bernard Law Montgomery

#33. You're an excellent judge of character, Sarene - except your own. Often our own opinions of ourselves are the most unrealistic.

Brandon Sanderson

#34. I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

Elizabeth Strout

#35. Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You're giving a gift. You're helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They'll become real.

James Chartrand

#36. I don't really worry so much about image. I try to just live my own life, my personal life, to my own sense of morality. In terms of the kinds of characters that I play, well, they could be anything.

Kevin Bacon

#37. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

John Carroll

#38. If you steal other people's characters, it doesn't work with the context of the scripts and what is written, so I wanted to make her my own. I was petrified, in the beginning, because it's such an iconic character, especially being a young lady myself.

Tamsin Egerton

#39. Why, a trick horse is kind of like an actor - no dignity, no character of his own.

John Steinbeck

#40. My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied.

Horatio Nelson

#41. A man of bad character punishes his own soul.

Al-Ghazali

#42. I think that in general
well, at least it's true for me
you tend to put something of yourself into the story as a whole. Not necessarily in any character, you understand. But you've got your own way of looking at the world, and that naturally will affect how you craft a story.

Sam Lake

#43. His own character is the arbiter of every ones fortune.

Publilius Syrus

#44. It's like parents choosing to raise their own standard of living rather than to provide for the future of their kids. You wouldn't consider that very admirable would you?

Sylvia Engdahl

#45. Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified. In my case, that role was Dracula.

Bela Lugosi

#46. That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

Michael Eklund

#47. In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me.

Dacia Maraini

#48. If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.

Woodrow Wilson

#49. Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.

Lilith Saintcrow

#50. Value work. But not any kind of work. Ask yourself "Is the work vital, strengthening my own character, or inspiring others, or helping the world?".

Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

#51. That's the great thing about the 'Sin City' movies. Each little slot is incredibly meaningful, and each character has their own moment.

Juno Temple

#52. I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.

Charles De Lint

#53. When the OutKast sound changed and I started producing my own records, I would mirror what I thought that character doing that music would look like. As the sound got a little wilder, freakier and funkier, so did the clothes. Then when the sound got more sophisticated, the clothes changed again.

Andre Benjamin

#54. The writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

Hunter S. Thompson

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins.

Charles Eastman

#58. When you dream, all the scenery, characters, events, perils, and outcomes are built from your own consciousness, the darks and oppressions as well as the delights. Same with the world awake, though it takes you longer to build it.

Richard Bach

#59. What I loved about playing the corpse is that obviously somebody else got to do the physical part. It appeals to the part of me that likes playing character parts and getting the chance to get away from my own physicality.

Helena Bonham Carter

#60. 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

#61. We want the education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one's own feet.

Swami Vivekananda

#62. Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

Flannery O'Connor

#66. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

Charles De Lint

#67. Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you'll have a happy life.

Dean Koontz

#68. Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering.

Fred Reed

#69. God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

Joyce Cary

#70. 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

#71. Sometimes minor characters are based on people I know, on friends of mine. But I'm not writing a thinly veiled version of my own life.

Cassandra Clare

#72. I've been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I'm trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit in it.

Emmy Rossum

#73. How in the end can one possibly hold anyone responsible for our own underdeveloped visions, or undeveloped strength of character?

Ruth St. Denis

#74. I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters.

Georgie Henley

#75. I have the right to try to overcome the challenges in my own life, she continued fiercely. Who's to say that's not what makes as strong and decent? How much character and strength do you think someone who's never had any sorrow or loss of hardship possesses, My lord?

Joey W. Hill

#76. When you make a mistake. You can do a little song and dance, put on a little show and have everyone laugh it off.
Or you can own it, and next time show everyone how great you are. While silencing your critiques.

Personally speaking... I don't help no one make a fool out of you.

Vincent Edwards

#77. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

May Sarton

#78. What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities.

Augustus Hare

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 'Deadwood' was just a wonderful opportunity for me. Outside of my own things that I've written, I hadn't had the opportunity to play a character with that amount of depth and range.

Ray McKinnon

#82. There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.

Stefan Zweig

#83. Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own.

Bernard Crick

#84. I feel blessed because not only my character is, but I, myself, can be a role model for people to show that is okay to be your own unique self.

Atticus Shaffer

#85. My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about - having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

Kevin Hart

#86. The author can always delve into his own personality and find aspects of himself with which he can dress his characters.

Terry Pratchett

#87. 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

#88. I actually think it's helped me as a writer to have to act. It's only when you actually start putting yourself out that you appreciate the anxiety that comes with having to try to sell a line, or with trying to own a character.

Mike White

#89. We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.

Huston Smith

#90. Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

S.E. Hinton

#91. It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

Jonathan Tropper

#92. A man's true estate of power and riches is to be in himself; not in his dwelling or position or external relations, but in his own essential character.

Henry Ward Beecher

#93. We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible.

Johan Huizinga

#94. When I sit down to talk to men's magazines, there's a certain character that I play. She's not fully fleshed out - she doesn't have her own name - but she shows up to do men's-magazine interviews.

Megan Fox

#95. Taking account of the value of externals, you see, comes at some cost to the value of one's own character.

Epictetus

#96. Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.

Ludwig Von Mises

#97. To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.

Melissa Leo

#98. When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

Orson Scott Card

#99. Having your own character in a video game is pretty cool.

Josie Maran

#100. The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

Terry Gross