“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

— Booker T. Washington

"Democracy and Education" http://web.archive.org/20071031084046/www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.4/html/222.html, speech, Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn NY (30 September 1896)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Character, not circumstances, makes the man." by Booker T. Washington?

Booker T. Washington photo

Booker T. Washington 48

African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor 1856–1915

Booker T. Washington quote: “Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

Related quotes

“Instead, therefore, of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Life and Works of Goethe (1855; repr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856) vol. 1, p. 30, often misattributed to Thomas Carlyle.
Context: Instead, therefore, of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance. Our strength is measured by our plastic power. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels, one warehouses, another villas.

“It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Agesilaus II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The man that makes a character makes foes.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

To Mr. Pope, epistle I, l. 28 (1730).

“Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

“Sounis had been thinking of Ambiades. "He would have been a better man under different circumstances."
Gen looked at him. "True enough," he said. "But does a good man let his circumstances determine his character?”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

“No change in circumstances can repair a defect of character.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).
1910s

“Circumstances does not make the man; it reveals him to himself. That is true only if you allow it to.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

“What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 11 (p. 105)

Related topics