Character quotes
14.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside character — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten."
"I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town-crier."
"Washington, in fact, had very little private life, but was eminently a public character."
"A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies."
"So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday."
"I look for an interesting and often times, fresh character. Something different that what is done all the time or than I've done recently. I look at who is directing. Those two variables as well as a third, which is the content and the quality of the screenplay. I look at the arcs of the scenes and characters and relationships."
"Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain."
"But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face."
"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."
"Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university."
"Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary."
"Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain."
"It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he."
"I say, without characters, fame lives long."
"To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters."
"Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds."
"I am sure, Though you can guess what temperance should be, You know not what it is."
"Men should be what they seem."
"Lord of the golden tongue and smiting eyes; Great out of season and untimely wise: A man whose virtue, genius, grandeur, worth, Wrought deadlier ill than ages can undo."
"Watch your character for your character is your destiny."
