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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"All movements begin and end, and all have been inspired by others that have come before them. They evolve and then deconstruct again. There are very few designers whose aesthetic I'm drawn to on a personal level. However, that's different from the ways in which I might dress the characters in my films."
"The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story."
"To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is the perfection of character."
"No character is ultimately tested until it has suffered."
"For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?"
"The way my books are structured, everyone was together, then they all went their separate ways and the story deltas out like that, and now it’s getting to the point where the story is beginning to delta back in, and the viewpoint characters are occasionally meeting up with each other now and being in the same point at the same time, which gives me a lot more flexibility for killing people."
"I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]"
"Do not conceive that fine Clothes make fine Men, any more than fine feathers make fine Birds. A plain genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace and embroidery in the Eyes of the judicious and sensible."
"Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time."
"Character, character, character. First, second and third ... we were pretty rusty initially. When you have a break for a few weeks you get a bit of rust."
"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."
"Our community belongs to us and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and destiny."
"And I thought, you know, a little gender confusion makes a better person. A little adversity in life at an early age. It's character building."
"Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty."
"Unconsciously we seek the principles and opinions which are suited to our temperament, so that at last it seems as if these principles and opinions had formed our character and given it support and stability."
"A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow."
"To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving."
"If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness"
"I might as well enquire,” replied she, “why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?"
"The chemical compounds are comparable to a system of planets in that the atoms are held together by chemical affinity. They may be more or less numerous, simple or complex in composition, and in the constitution of the materials, they play the same role as Mars and Venus do in our planetary system, or the compound members such as our earth with its moon, or Jupiter with its satellites... If in such a system a particle is replaced by one of different character, the equilibrium can persist, and then the new compound will exhibit properties similar to those shown by the original substance."
