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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"I'm often asked, Which is more important--attitude or skill? The answer is that it's somewhat like asking which leg of a three-legged stool is most important. It is my complete conviction, based on a considerable amount of research, that if you have the right attitude, combined with the right skills, and build your attitude and your skills on a solid character base, you can enjoy long-lasting success."
"A pleasing personality helps you win friends and influence people. Add character to that formula, and keep those friends and maintain that influence."
"For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life."
"I'm a lurid character!"
"If a person has built a sound character, it makes but little difference what people say about him, because he will win in the end."
"I always find it a little scary to say that I'm like a character."
"I studied psychology in school, and the best psychology is in literature. It's so much easier to understand a character than a theory. You can recognize yourself—or other people—in a different way."
"I think you always need to be able to relate to your characters, but that doesn't necessarily mean...you have to understand why they do what they do, but you don't actually have to be like that yourself."
"It really wasn't my thing. It still isn't my thing, the whole science-fiction action thing. I prefer simpler, character-based movies."
"People are like, 'What's Game of Thrones about?' I'm like, 'It's in the title.' For real, this is a game for the Iron Throne. No matter what character you are, you're sucked into that at some point."
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood."
"But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.... The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class."
"The bitter attacks I faced were far worse than any fighter I ever faced in the ring. The caustic remarks, the threats to injure me, the shots at my character-fighting those were my toughest battle."
"The one nice thing about doing a character for a long time is, you begin to feel more comfortable, and you are thinking less and behaving more. It's always best not to be thinking a hell of a lot while you're acting, because you want it to be as spontaneous as possible, not too intellectual. Just behaving and listening to other people who you're doing scenes with. I always like the latter when it looks easy, even though it may not be."
"The one nice thing about doing a character for a long time is, you begin to feel more comfortable, and you are thinking less and behaving more."
"I look at it scene-by-scene. Whether it's a historical character or not, whatever, on the page is one thing and delving into the history or somebody is one thing, but making something work for an audience in front of a camera is another exercise and you bring whatever authenticity you can to it."
"I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive."
"I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off."
"My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain."
"The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable."
