Quotes about character (2978 quotes, page 25)

“the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to some kinds of it.
Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.

Condorcet's Life of Turgot; a book well calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life , Men , Books , Education

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 9 June 1831 Selected Letters, ed. Roger Boesche, UofC Press 1985, p. 39 https://books.google.de/books?id=dwDWCAhP5EMC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=character.
1830s

Money , World , Question

“You need clear, energetic minds, in order to appreciate the exalted character of the truth, to value the atonement, and to place the right estimate upon eternal things.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Counsels On Diet and Foods (1938), Section 2, p. 47

Truth

“Zola, who has so faithfully described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 109.

Men , Way

“The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival. […] Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those "maypoles," cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose. Of course we may have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals. Were we [in Germany] prepared for the possibility that the official forces, and especially the bearers of political power, would artificially create the appearance of the festive with so huge an expense in external arrangements? And that this seductive, scarcely delectable appearance of artificial "holidays" would be so totally lacking in the essential quality, that true and ultimate harmony with the world? And that such holidays would in fact depend on the suppression of that harmony and derive their dangerous seduction from that very fact?”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

In the three rhetorical questions that end this quote, Pieper alludes to the Nazis' elaborately stage-managed "festivals", in particular the Nuremberg Rally, the subject of Leni Riefenstahl's classic propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 51–52

Life , People , Age , World

“They first sallied forth in a body of about 500 persons to attack the market place of the village known as Poorwa, where they slaughtered a cow. With the blood of the animal they defiled a Hindu temple. Then they hung up the four quarters (of the cow) in the different parts of the market place. They maltreated and wounded an unfortunate Brahmin and threatened to make him a Muslim… The village of Laoghatty in the Nadia district was their next object attack. Here they commenced operations by the repetition of the same outrage to the religious feelings of the Hindus which they had committed at Poorwa, viz, the slaughter of a cow in that part of the village exclusively occupied by Hindu residents. But being opposed by Hardeb Ray, a principal inhabitant of the village, and a Brahmin, at the head of a party of villagers, an affray ensued in which one Debnath Ray was killed and Hardeb Ray and a number of villagers were severely wounded… Titu’s party went on increasing and with growing confidence they went on killing cows in different places, making raids on the neighbouring villages, forcing from the raiyats agreements to furnish grain, compelling many of them to profess conformity to the tenets of their sect… They openly proclaimed themselves masters of the country, asserting that the Mussalmans from whom the English usurped it, were the rightful owners of the empire… The rebels issued parwanas to the principal zamindars of the district. Their tenor was as follows: “This country is now given to our Deen Mohammed. You must, therefore, immediately send grain to the army.’ In a written report the magistrate of Nadia states that a paper written in Bengali and signed in Arabic characters, was put into his hand, purporting to be an order of Allah to the Pal Chowdhuries of Ranaghat to supply russud (rations) to the army of fakirs who were about to fight with the government.”

Titumir

About the exploits of Titumir. Narahari Kaviraj, Wahabi And Faraizi Rebels of Bengal, New Delhi, 1982, Pp. 37-38, 43-44, 50-51. Quoted in Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Feeling , Confidence , Animals , Fight

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Women , Men , Children , Secret

“What the world wants is character. The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love, selfless. That love will make every word tell like a thunderbolt.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Love , Life , World

“According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 154.

Stupidity , World , Intelligence , Nature

“Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

William Bateson, Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1909), Cambridge University Press, p. 5
Here Bateson alludes to the now-discredit ideas of blending inheritance and pangenesis
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913)

Understanding , Nature , Reality , Parent

“There is reason, however, to think that the author would have rendered it much more interesting, and have carried it to si higher degree of perfection, had he lived in an age more enlightened and better informed in regard to the mathematics and natural philosophy. Since the death of that mathematician, indeed, the arts and sciences have been so much improved, that what in his time might have been entitled to the character of mediocrity, would not at present be supportable. How many new discoveries in every part of philosophy? How many new phenomena observed, some of which have even given birth to the most fertile branches of the sciences? We shall mention only electricity, an inexhaustible source of profound reflection, and of experiments highly amusing. Chemistry also is a science, the most common and slightest principles of which were quite unknown to Ozanam. In short, we need not hesitate to pronounce that Ozanam's work contains a multitude of subjects treated of with an air of credulity, and so much prolixity, that it appears as if the author, or rather his continuators, had no other object in view than that of multiplying the volumes.
To render this work, then, more worthy of the enlightened agt in which we live, it was necessary to make numerous corrections and considerable additions. A task which we have endeavoured to discharge with all diligence”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. vi; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA412, Volume 38, (1803), p. 412

Death , Age , Art , Mathematics

“The man, whose head and heart had in a desperate emergency and amidst a despairing people paved the way for their deliverance, was no more, when it became possible to carry out his design. Whether his successor Hasdrubal forbore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed to him to have not yet come, or whether, more a statesman than a general, he believed himself unequal to the conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. When, at the beginning of [221 B. C], he fell by the hand of an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Hamilcar. He was still a young man--born in [247 B. C], and now, therefore, in his twenty-ninth year [221 B. C]; but his had already been a life of manifold experience. His first recollections pictured to him his father fighting in a distant land and conquering on Ercte; he had keenly shared that unconquered father's feelings on the Peace of Catulus (also see Treaty of Lutatius), on the bitter return home, and throughout the horrors of the Libyan war. While yet a boy, he had followed his father to the camp; and he soon distinguished himself. His light and firmly-knit frame made him an excellent runner and fencer, and a fearless rider at full speed; the privation of sleep did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy or to dispense with food. Although his youth had been spent in the camp, he possessed such culture as belonged to the Phoenicians of rank in his day; in Greek, apparently after he had become a general, he made such progress under the guidance of his confidant Sosilus of Sparta as to be able to compose state papers in that language. As he grew up, he entered the army of his father, to perform his first feats of arms under the paternal eye and to see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he had commanded the cavalry under his sister's husband, Hasdrubal, and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades now summoned him--the tried, although youthful general--to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law had lived and died. He took up the inheritance, and he was worthy of it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of various sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous. But though anger and envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents. Laying aside wretched inventions which furnish their own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants, particularly Hannibal Monomachus and Mago the Sammite, were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding him which may not be justified under the circumstances, and according to the international law, of the times; and all agree in this, that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthusiasm, caution and energy. He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care. By an unrivaled system of espionage--he had regular spies even in Rome--he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair, in order to procure information on some point or other. Every page of the history of this period attests his genius in strategy; and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution, and in the unparalleled influence which as a foreign exile he exercised in the cabinets of the eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men is shown by his incomparable control over an army of various nations and many tongues--an army which never in the worst times mutinied against him. He was a great man; wherever he went, he riveted the eyes of all.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome, Volume 2 Translated by W.P. Dickson
On Hannibal the man and soldier
The History of Rome - Volume 2

Life , Men , Money , Hate

“Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a human canvas without paint - blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles - nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not leading characters. These parts usually -but not always- went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality.”

Jasper Fforde book The Well of Lost Plots

The Well of Lost Plots (2003), ch.1, p. 11

Books , Way , History , Business

“Our public interest depends on private character, on civic duty and family bonds and basic fairness, on uncounted, unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom. Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love. The most important tasks of a democracy are done by everyone. I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well. In all these ways, I will bring the values of our history to the care of our times.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, First inaugural address (January 2001)

Love , Life , Family , Justice

“In talking about memory and our history, I think our humanity, especially in China, is cut. Cut, broken, separated. If we have a character from our history and memory, the character is broken, it’s shattered.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Escape from Propaganda, 2009

History , Thinking , Memory

“Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i. e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

for science and reality
Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 118

Knowledge , Reality , Science , Time

“We got a lot of letters all the time, and I was told quite frequently by girls who were going into the medical world or the science world or the FBI world or other worlds that I reigned, that they were pursuing those pursuits because of the character of Scully. And I said, 'Yay!”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Anderson tells that she has long been aware of "The Scully Effect" and the influence her character had on young women — reported in Jennifer Vineyard Vulture.com "Nearly Everything The X-Files’ David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson Said This Weekend" http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/david-duchovny-gillian-anderson-nycc-paley-center-quotes.html (October 14, 2013)
2010s

World , Girl , Science , Time

“On 30 Rock and Studio 60 and the Sunset Strip airing in the same year: "We’ll probably end up doing a terrible crossover, where the Matthew Perry character on the drama rapes my character on the comedy—and then the ‘Law & Order’ team solves the crime."”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424ta_talk_friend
On 30 Rock

Law

“Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 264

Success

“The real plot in fiction parallels life in that it happens within the characters.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Life

“If you can have vivid characters, they will make the story themselves. By putting them in certain situations or having one meet another, they naturally make stories by reacting to each other.”

Takehiko Inoue (1967) Japanese artist

Nature

“When a nation is invited to join in a union with another, the ignorant, bedazzled statesman might rush into it, young people enamored of beautiful ideas and lacking good sense might celebrate it, and venal or demented politicians might welcome it as a mercy and glorify it with servile words, but he who feels in his heart the anguish of the patria, he who watches and foresees, must investigate and must say what elements constitute the character of the nation that invites and the nation that is invited, and whether they are predisposed toward a common labor by common antecedents and habits, and whether or not it is probable that the fearsome elements of the inviting nation will, in the union it aspires to, be developed to the endangerment of the invited one.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

The Monetary Conference of the American Republics (1891)

People , Beauty , Feeling , Idea

“It is not inappropriate to describe the function of the teacher as that of acting to compel awareness. This is not to say that such compulsion contrives to bring a subject to act in the way in which the teacher believes the free man ought to act. It aspires only to assure that the subject is acting for himself and not as the mere instrument of unmediated impulses. There is even a compulsory quality about the Socratic method for, by asking questions, by enquiring in the reasons and grounds for doing this or that, it forces a man to conceive of himself in terms of intentions; it thereby forces him to be free.
It does not force him, however, to act in a manner substantively different from this original impulses. … The man who swings at his enemy in blind rage may, after lengthy consideration of creative alternatives, swing at him with cool deliberation. The intentionalist cannot accept the tradition of Kant, Green, and Bosanquet which polarizes conscious duty and preconscious desire and presupposes that reflective awareness will always produce substantive changes in the character of our goals, for to him it is the qualitative change that turns mere impulses into goals that is significant for freedom.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 78-79

Way , Question , Freedom , Teachers

“It is usually assumed that, in speaking, in the 1844 Manuscripts, of man’s “being reduced to the level of the animals,” and of man’s alienation from his “species-being” under the conditions of capitalist production, Marx is thinking in terms of an abstract conception of “man” as being alienated from his biological characteristics as a species. So, it is presumed, at this initial stage in the evolution of his thought, Marx believed that man is essentially a creative being whose “natural” propensities are denied by the restrictive character of capitalism. Actually, Marx holds, on the contrary, that the enormous productive power of capitalism generates possibilities for the future development of man which could not have been possible under prior forms of productive system. The organization of social relationships within which capitalist production is carried on in fact leads to the failure to realize these historically generated possibilities. The character of alienated labor does not express a tension between “man in nature” (non-alienated) and “man in society” (alienated), but between the potential generated by a specific form of society—capitalism—and the frustrated realization of that potential. What separates man from the animals is not the mere existence of biological differences between mankind and other species, but the cultural achievements of men, which are the outcome of a very long process of social development.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 15-16.

Men , Failure , Nature , Thinking

“The preservation of game involves a list of evils to the farmer of which the loss of money is probably not the greatest. It destroys his self-respect and the independence of his character. He takes a farm and contracts to pay a rent; he stocks it with cattle and sheep; he ploughs and sows and reaps—his landlord also stocks the same farm with hares and rabbits and pheasants, and enjoys his battue, or sends to market the game which his tenant's produce has fed. The tenant has his servants, to superintend or conduct the operations on his farm, and to feed and protect his cattle and his flocks—the landlord has his keepers to secure his game, and these keepers are a spy upon the tenant himself, and traverse his field by day or night, as though superior to his servants and himself. In all this there is a fruitful source of depredation to the farmer. Men of capital and independent feeling will shun an occupation which involves so much humiliation.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech on the Game Laws (1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 125-126.
1840s

Men , Money , Feeling , Game

“As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Response to the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)

People , Victory

“The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.”

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) French philosopher

In a letter accepting the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1927/bergson-speech.html, read by the French minister, Armand Bernard.

World , Communication , Study , Country

“You know my philosophy is that the world is a big place so if you get the chance to live abroad lessons in life it gives you are like no other. I moved to Cascias when I was one and a half. I do feel very fortunate that I grew up in a Latin culture and learnt another language. When I approach a character or a script I can approach it from different points of view, with maybe a more international perspective.”

Annabelle Wallis (1984) British Actress

Glass talks to Annabelle Wallis about her career-defining appearance in Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders http://www.theglassmagazine.com/interview-with-annabelle-wallis/ (November 12, 2013)

Life , World , Feeling , Chance

“Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.”

Abraham Maslow book Motivation and Personality

Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 103.

Love , People

“The dialogue consists almost entirely of terse screams: Watch it! Incoming! Move! Look out! Fire! Move! The only characters I remember having four sentences in a row are the anchors on cable news. … Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battle-los-angeles-2011 of Battle: Los Angeles (9 March 2011)
Reviews, Half-star reviews

Women , Men , Thinking , Time

“EXCELLENCE in <140 Characters: Cherish your people, cuddle your customers, wander around, “try it” beats “talk about it,” Excellence or else, tell the truth.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

TomPeters.com - Abu Dhabi, World Strategy Summit, Main Program, November 17, 2015

People , Truth

“My friend was of opinion that when a man of rank appeared in that character [as an author], he deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

May 1781
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV

Appearance

“My drawings [c. 1945 - 1955] were almost always figures, many pseudo-self-portraits, which I often set against a kind of sun or focus, as if the whole universe radiated from my head, from a point between my eyes. My few oils make even clearer this vision of an axial character, centrally placed, facing the spectator, or turned around, with symmetrical postures, as one in prayer; they show the influence of [medieval] Catalan Romanesque art. In general, molecular rays from the periphery appear to form the central figure and converge in his head, or come out of it, and give life to his surroundings.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), p. 9
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

Life , Art , Universe , Appearance

“In a Thumbnail Sketch here is [the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness] so far:There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their talents may more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves part of the design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Source: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 253–4.

Reading , Success , Animals , Parting

“Sometimes I have feared that, in some wild paroxysm of rage, the white race, forgetful of the claims of humanity and the precepts of the Christian religion, will proceed to slaughter the negro in wholesale, as some of that race have attempted to slaughter Chinamen, and as it has been done in detail in some districts of the Southern States. The grounds of this fear, however, have in some measure decreased, since the negro has largely disappeared from the arena of Southern politics, and has betaken himself to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education, though even here, if over-prosperous, he is likely to excite a dangerous antagonism; for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The negro as a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, and yet I think that that resistance will gradually yield to the pressure of wealth, education, and high character.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

People , Education , Fear , Religion

“They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revelation of the inherent character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person projecting this particular image.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Complex Vision (1920), Chapter I

Soul , Universe , Parting , Personality

“I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It's very character-building.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer
2000s
Variant: I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year… It's very character-building.

Personality

“In the third period, which lasted from the middle of the eighteenth century until late in the nineteenth century, attention was turned to critical investigations of the true nature of the number π itself, considered independently of mere analytical representations. The number was first studied in respect of its rationality or irrationality, and it was shown to be really irrational. When the discovery was made of the fundamental distinction between algebraic and transcendental numbers, i. e. between those numbers which can be, and those numbers which cannot be, roots of an algebraical equation with rational coefficients, the question arose to which of these categories the number π belongs. It was finally established by a method which involved the use of some of the most modern of analytical investigation that the number π was transcendental. When this result was combined with the results of a critical investigation of the possibilities of a Euclidean determination, the inferences could be made that the number π, being transcendental, does not admit of a construction either by a Euclidean determination, or even by a determination in which the use of other algebraic curves besides the straight line and the circle are permitted. The answer to the original question thus obtained is of a conclusive negative character; but it is one in which a clear account is given of the fundamental reasons upon which that negative answer rests.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 12

Question , Nature , Study

“In art a thing is beautiful whenever it has character. Character — this is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, whether beautiful or ugly. You may even call it a double truth. For it is the inner essence expressed by the outer appearance. It is the soul, the sentiment, the idea that shines out through the features of a fare, the pose and action of a human body, the tones of a skym the line of a horizon.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Truth , Beauty , Art , Soul

“Evolution must have involved the simultaneous change in many genes, which doubtless accounts for its slowness. Here matters would have been easier if heritable variations really formed a continuum, as Darwin apparently thought, i. e. if there were no limit to the possible smallness of a variation. But this is clearly not the case when we are considering meristic characters. …the atomic nature of Mendelian inheritance suggests very strongly that even where variation is apparently continuous this appearance is deceptive.”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, pp. 103-104.

Nature , Appearance , Change

“The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the old B[oy’s] O[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.”

Charles Hamilton (writer) (1876–1961) English writer of school stories

George Orwell, Essay Boys' Weeklies (1940) http://georgeorwellnovels.com/essays/boys-weeklies/
About

School , Boy , Sister , Appearance

“…the basic principles of the military services are unchangeable. Courage and candor, obedience and comradeship, love of fatherland and loyalty to the State: these are ever the distinguishing characteristics of the soldier and sailor. Building character through intelligent training and education is always the first and greatest goal.”

Erich Raeder (1876–1960) German naval officer and Großadmiral during World War II

Quoted in "He Led Hitler's Navy," "New York Times" article, April 24, 1960.

Love , Education , Intelligence , Courage

“It's much more a matter of playing the characters as they were written by the authors, because of the liberties that have been taken with pretty much all of them. They've all been distorted in one way or another, because the authors have hardly stuck to the facts.”

Tim Curry (1946) English actor, voice artist, comedian and singer

Tim Curry Plunges Ahead Into the Past, Part IV http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/24/theater/tim-curry-plunges-ahead-into-the-past-part-iv.html (January 24, 1990)

Way

“To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no permanent root in their hearts.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the unveiling of the Board of Trade war memorial (19 December 1923), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 273-274.
1923

People , Feeling , Thinking , Freedom

“Character is of the first importance, but intelligence is nevertheless essential. Ii is desirable for a leader to have a broad education. History and poetry increase his knowledge of human passions. Culture offers the man of action opportunities now and then to capture his serenity; it puts at his disposal models of order and clarity. It is, in a sense, a work of art to reconstruct a country or to lead an army, and the man who has acquired a sense of beauty from his studies will be the more successful for it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Education , Beauty , Art , History

“I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)
Context: I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

“We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419; a portion of this paragraph has sometimes been misquoted as: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion."
Context: Our code must be framed to speed the absorption of immigrants into our economy, culture and society; to fuse the returning tribes into a homogeneous national and cultural unit; to forward our physical and moral healing and the cleansing of our lives from the trivia and dross which gathered upon us in dependence and exile. To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion. Laws which lag behind development, merely a digest of experience and the lessons of the past, are useless to us. We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.

Change , Time

“It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

On Ulysses S. Grant http://www.granthomepage.com/grantgeneral.htm (1885), as quoted in Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year (2011) http://books.google.com/books?id=MZ2BiGC3gHwC&pg=PR8&lpg=PR8&dq=sherman+%22It+will+be+a+thousand+years+before+Grant's+character+is+fully+appreciated%22&source=bl&ots=YddNqD14gr&sig=lO5z_VXQoQ5iY_eSJGot5qHy_JM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vF65UsC5L-XIsASH6YDICw&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false, by Charles Bracelen Flood.
1880s, 1885
Context: It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time... he fixes in his mind what is the true objective and abandons all minor ones. He dismisses all possibility of defeat. He believes in himself and in victory. If his plans go wrong he is never disconcerted but promptly devises a new one and is sure to win in the end. Grant more nearly impersonated the American character of 1861-65 than any other living man. Therefore he will stand as the typical hero of the great Civil War in America.

Time

“All you’ve got to do is just be inventive with this character and have fun. That’s the definition of an ingenious character. To get to step into the shoes of the Tick, I just felt that was an honor.”

Patrick Warburton (1964) American actor

"Interview with Patrick Warburton" by Josh Bell at AboutDOTcom (2 March 2009)]
Context: It is more inspirational, I’d say, with the Tick. Because once you grasp or realize who this guy is, the fact that you’re inventing a world and an atmosphere and a persona that, really, his past is a mystery. So everything that he looks at or perceives can be brand new, and he can get really, really excited and intrigued by something that’s just a commonality for everybody else, that’s humorous. He’s like a child; everything’s new. So you just bring that attitude to him, a childlike attitude of discovering things.
Yet you’ve got this great writing, where everything’s mixed metaphor, and he’s articulate, and he describes everything in a new way. It’s inspiring as an actor to be able to go to that place. Anything you do is not going to be wrong. All you’ve got to do is just be inventive with this character and have fun. That’s the definition of an ingenious character. To get to step into the shoes of the Tick, I just felt that was an honor. Once again, I will reiterate that Fox apparently didn’t have a clue.

Shoe

“Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)
Context: Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

People , Law , Nature , Help

“I say, that this free exercise of reason is all I ask for the vindication of the character of Jesus.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to William Short (4 August 1820) http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_jesus.html on his reason for composing a Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus and referring to Jesus’ biographers, the Gospel writers. Published in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Merrill D. Peterson, ed., New York: Library of America, 1994, pp. 1435–1440
1820s
Context: My aim in that was, to justify the character of Jesus against the fictions of his pseudo-followers, which have exposed him to the inference of being an impostor. For if we could believe that he really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods and the charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind, that he was an impostor. I give no credit to their falsifications of his actions and doctrines, and to rescue his character, the postulate in my letter asked only what is granted in reading every other historian. … I say, that this free exercise of reason is all I ask for the vindication of the character of Jesus. We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications. Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed. These could not be inventions of the groveling authors who relate them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds. They shew that there was a character, the subject of their history, whose splendid conceptions were above all suspicion of being interpolations from their hands. Can we be at a loss in separating such materials, and ascribing each to its genuine author? The difference is obvious to the eye and to the understanding, and we may read as we run to each his part; and I will venture to affirm, that he who, as I have done, will undertake to winnow this grain from its chaff, will find it not to require a moment's consideration. The parts fall asunder of themselves, as would those of an image of metal and clay. … There are, I acknowledge, passages not free from objection, which we may, with probability, ascribe to Jesus himself; but claiming indulgence from the circumstances under which he acted. His object was the reformation of some articles in the religion of the Jews, as taught by Moses. That sect had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust. Jesus, taking for his type the best qualities of the human head and heart, wisdom, justice, goodness, and adding to them power, ascribed all of these, but in infinite perfection, to the Supreme Being, and formed him really worthy of their adoration. Moses had either not believed in a future state of existence, or had not thought it essential to be explicitly taught to his people. Jesus inculcated that doctrine with emphasis and precision. Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue; Jesus exposed their futility and insignificance. The one instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence. The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever dangerous. Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law. He was justifiable, therefore, in avoiding these by evasions, by sophisms, by misconstructions and misapplications of scraps of the prophets, and in defending himself with these their own weapons, as sufficient, ad homines, at least. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. But that he might conscientiously believe himself inspired from above, is very possible.

Exercises

“Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

“Confusing ‘Character’ with ‘Temperament’”
Clearing the Ground (1986)
Context: Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters.
We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable. Of course, the optimum for a person is to possess both an easy temperament and a strong character, but this is a rare combination, and few of us are that lucky. The people who get things done tend to be prickly, and the people we enjoy being with tend to be accepting, and there seems to be no way to get around this. Obviously, there are many combinations of character and temperament, in varying degrees, so that this is only a rough generalization — but I think it is one worth remembering when we make personal judgments.

Strong

“In the past, he had read of people with such public spirit and unselfish character only in novels. He had regarded them as nothing but ideal, imaginary creations of literary writers. Now he has seen such a hero in the flesh with his own eyes.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

A Battle For Life (July 1958)
Context: Later the assistant chief surgeon told people that he had been a surgeon for eleven years, had seen not a few patients die and consequently had become quite cold and indifferent. He was interested only in diseases as such and had no feelings for his patients as people. But what Chiu Tsai-kang had said impressed him deeply. Even after he left the patient's room he thought it over for quite a long while. Here was a man awaiting death who had to clench his teeth to endure the searing pain of his whole body, but who constantly had the nation's steel production on his mind and who wholeheartedly desired to return to his furnace. In the past, he had read of people with such public spirit and unselfish character only in novels. He had regarded them as nothing but ideal, imaginary creations of literary writers. Now he has seen such a hero in the flesh with his own eyes.

People , Reading , Past

“Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Source: The Artful Universe (1995), Ch. 5, pp. 219-220

Truth , World , Beauty , Way

“Do not, however, mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to Benjamin Vaughan http://www.2think.org/priestly.shtml (24 October 1788).
Epistles
Context: Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however, mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.

“They come to a life of independence, but to a life of labor—and, if they cannot accommodate themselves to the character, moral, political, and physical, of this country, with all its compensating balances of good and evil, the Atlantic is always open to them, to return to the land of their nativity and their fathers.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Letter written as Secretary of State under President James Monroe (1819), as quoted in "What John Quincy Adams Said About Immigration Will Blow Your Mind" by D.C. McAllister, in The Federalist (18 August 2014) http://thefederalist.com/2014/08/18/what-john-quincy-adams-said-about-immigration-will-blow-your-mind
Context: There is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights. Privileges are granted by European sovereigns to particular classes of individuals, for purposes of general policy; but the general impression here is that privileges granted to one denomination of people, can very seldom be discriminated from erosions of the rights of others. [Immigrants], coming here, are not to expect favors from the governments. They are to expect, if they choose to become citizens, equal rights with those of the natives of the country. They are to expect, if affluent, to possess the means of making their property productive, with moderation, and with safety;—if indigent, but industrious, honest and frugal, the means of obtaining easy and comfortable subsistence for themselves and their families. They come to a life of independence, but to a life of labor—and, if they cannot accommodate themselves to the character, moral, political, and physical, of this country, with all its compensating balances of good and evil, the Atlantic is always open to them, to return to the land of their nativity and their fathers.

Life , Evil , Country

“You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter (21 June 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Thinking

“It is more a subject of joy that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. But it proves more forcibly the necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free State.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Referring to the importance of well trained militia amidst the populations of the states and their preferability to standing armies, in a letter to James Monroe (19 June 1813), published Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 19 June 1813 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0188; though most publications of the letter since the 1830s usually provide a date of 18 June 1813, the actual manuscript seems to distinctly read "June 19 '13" http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/046/0800/0894.jpg; a portion of this statement is sometimes paraphrased: "Every citizen should be a soldier."
1810s
Context: !-- Dear Sir,—Your favors of the 7th and 16th are received, and --> I now return you the memoir … I am much gratified by its communication, because, as the plan appeared in the newspapers soon after the new Secretary of War came into office, we had given him the credit of it. Every line of it is replete with wisdom; and we might lament that our tardy enlistments prevented its execution, were we not to reflect that these proceeded from the happiness of our people at home. It is more a subject of joy that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. But it proves more forcibly the necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free State. Where there is no oppression there will be no pauper hirelings. We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done.

Joy

“The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

The Marshall Plan Speech (1947)
Context: The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their product for currencies, the continuing value of which is not open to question.

Truth , Food , Help

“Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)
Context: Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Life , Children

“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Katherine Mansfield (1925)
Context: Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.

Life , Secret , Family , Passion

“There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in West Calder, Scotland (27 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), p. 117.
1870s
Context: [My sixth principle is that] the foreign policy of England should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.

Idea , Freedom , Loyalty , Happiness

“I said this is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/batman-begins-2005 of Batman Begins (13 June 2005)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: I said this is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There's something to it.

Waiting

“The beginning is from God: for the business which is in hand, having the character of good so strongly impressed upon it, appears manifestly to proceed from God, who is the author of good, and the Father of Lights.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 93
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: The beginning is from God: for the business which is in hand, having the character of good so strongly impressed upon it, appears manifestly to proceed from God, who is the author of good, and the Father of Lights. Now in divine operations even the smallest beginnings lead of a certainty to their end. And as it was said of spiritual things, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” so is it in all the greater works of Divine Providence; everything glides on smoothly and noiselessly, and the work is fairly going on “before men are aware that it has begun. Nor should the prophecy of Daniel be forgotten, touching the last ages of the world: —“Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased;” clearly intimating that the thorough passage of the world (which now by so many distant voyages seems to be accomplished, or in course of accomplishment), and the advancement of the sciences, are destined by fate, that is, by Divine Providence, to meet in the same age.

God , Business , Light , Appearance

“I like digging into these characters that are a lot more complex, and there's a lot that isn't apparent on the surface”

Alicia Witt (1975) American actress

As quoted in "Why Now Is a Divine Time for Alicia Witt", by Sarah Beauchamp at Huffington Post (30 May 2014) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-beauchamp/why-alicia-witt-should-be_b_5400673.html
Context: I like digging into these characters that are a lot more complex, and there's a lot that isn't apparent on the surface … In a weird way, you can access all that fear and pain. … Nothing makes me happier than when somebody figures out I was in something, and then they'd seen me in something else, and had no idea it was the same person… Then I feel like I've done my job. … I've always loved finding characters that are not always the most likable ones when you first meet them, and finding a way to make them people that viewers will identify with, even against their better judgment.

“The American character is both idealistic and realistic: why can't our government reflect both?”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Remarks to the Senate's Council on Foreign Relations (31 October 2006) http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=265808&&
Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)
Context: The lost opportunities of the years since September 11 are the stuff of tragedy. Remember the people rallying in sympathy on the streets of Teheran, the famous headline — "we are all Americans now." Five years later much of the world wonders what America is now. As we face this landscape of failure and disorder, nothing is more urgent than for us to begin again to rebuild a bipartisan consensus to ensure our interests, increase our security and advance our values. It could well start with what our founders had in mind when they pledged "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" in the Declaration of Independence. I think it's fair to say we are now all internationalists and we are all realists. This Administration's choices were false choices. Internationalism versus unilateralism. Realism versus idealism. Is there really any argument that America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom, and yet we must be more willing to work in concert with other nations and international institutions to reach common goals? The American character is both idealistic and realistic: why can't our government reflect both?

“Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since.”

Bryan Magee (1930–2019) British politician

Source: Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), p. 157
Context: As Voltaire once remarked, "It is the privilege of the real genius, especially one who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity." The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. For that reason there has been, ever since, a watershed in understanding between those who have taken his work on board and those who have not. For a good many of the problems he uncovered, the solutions he put forward have not stood the test of time, but his uncovering of the problems remains the most illuminating thing a philosopher has ever done. Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since.

Problem

“Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Mailer's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition (1998)
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Context: For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …

Life , Feeling

“All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent (1907), Ch. 3
Context: All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production — by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalist for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.

Life

“If we are to have that harmony and tranquility, that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language. If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed. Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character. The same principle that it is necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among our own people it is also necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among the different nations.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)
Context: If we are to have that harmony and tranquility, that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language. If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed. Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character. The same principle that it is necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among our own people it is also necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among the different nations. During the war we were required not only to put a strong emphasis on everything that appealed to our own national pride but an equally strong emphasis on that which tended to disparage other peoples. There was an intensive cultivation of animosities and hatreds and enmities, together with a blind appeal to force, that took possession of substantially all the peoples of the earth. Of course, these ministered to the war spirit. They supplied the incentive for destruction, the motive for conquest. But in time of peace these sentiments are not helps but hindrances; they are not constructive.

People , Country

“The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

Sea , Men , Change

“The "poetic avant-garde" relies on fantasy and dream reality as much as the Theatre of the Absurd does; it also disregards such traditional axioms as that of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the need for a plot.”

Martin Esslin (1918–2002) Playwright, theatre critic, scholar

Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Context: The "poetic avant-garde" relies on fantasy and dream reality as much as the Theatre of the Absurd does; it also disregards such traditional axioms as that of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the need for a plot. Yet basically the "poetic avant-garde" represents a different mood; it is more lyrical, and far less violent and grotesque. Even more important is its different attitude toward language: the "poetic avant-garde" relies to a far greater extent on consciously "poetic" speech; it aspires to plays that are in effect poems, images composed of a rich web of verbal associations.
The Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters. In Ionesco's The Chairs, for example, the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered but in the fact that they are spoken to an ever-growing number of empty chairs.

Dreams , Reality

“Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.”

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

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.

Appearance

“The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 21 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
Context: Although Freedom is, primarily, an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in History to our sensuous vision. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not, only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.

Men , World , History , Spring

“States are much at variance in the civic character giving to free persons of colour; those of most of the States, not excepting such as have abolished slavery, imposing various disqualifications, which degrade them from the rank and rights of white persons. All these perplexities develop more and more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to General Marquis de Lafayette https://archive.org/stream/jstor-2713830/2713830_djvu.txt (25 November 1820), Montpelier
1820s
Context: The subject which ruffles the surface of public affairs most, at present, is furnished by the transmission of the "Territory" of Missouri from a state of nonage to a maturity for self-Government, and for a membership in the Union. Among the questions involved in it, the one most immediately interesting to humanity is the question whether a toleration or prohibition of slavery Westward of the Mississippi would most extend its evils. The human part of the argument against the prohibition turns on the position, that whilst the importation of slaves from abroad is precluded, a diffusion of those in the Country tends at once to meliorate their actual condition, and to facilitate their eventual emancipation. Unfortunately, the subject, which was settled at the last session of Congress by a mutual concession of the parties, is reproduced on the arena by a clause in the Constitution of Missouri, distinguishing between free persons of colour and white persons, and providing that the Legislature of the new State shall exclude from it the former. What will be the issue of the revived discussion is yet to be seen. The ease opens the wider field, as the Constitution and laws of the different States are much at variance in the civic character giving to free persons of colour; those of most of the States, not excepting such as have abolished slavery, imposing various disqualifications, which degrade them from the rank and rights of white persons. All these perplexities develop more and more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.

Personality

“Character teaches above our wills.”

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

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

“You would not object or think it wrong, for a man to plead the cause of the suffering and the outcast; and surely the moral character of the act is not changed because it is done by a woman. I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Letter to her mother (14 March 1847)
Context: If, while I hear the shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth for the dumb, am I not guilty? Or should I go from house to house to do it, when I could tell so many more in less time, if they should be gathered in one place? You would not object or think it wrong, for a man to plead the cause of the suffering and the outcast; and surely the moral character of the act is not changed because it is done by a woman. I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex. I only ask that you will not withhold your consent from my doing anything that I think is my duty to do.

Sex , Thinking , Suffering , Change

“The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 38

“Einstein showed us how to find all the possible universes that were consistent with the laws of physics and the character of gravity, how to reconstruct their pasts and predict their futures. But actually finding them was no easy task.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Preface
The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)

Law , Universe , Past , Future

“One circumstance that helped our character development: we were needed.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967); also quoted in Childhood Revisited (1974) by Joel I. Milgram and Dorothy June Sciarra, p. 90
1960s
Context: One circumstance that helped our character development: we were needed. I often think today of what an impact could be made if children believed they were contributing to a family's essential survival and happiness. In the transformation from a rural to an urban society, children are — though they might not agree — robbed of the opportunity to do genuinely responsible work.

Help

“All savages seem to us alike as the trees of the distant forest. Here and there one unites in his own person, all the excellencies, and becomes the favourable representative of the whole, the image of savage greatness, the one grand character in which all others are lost to history or observation.”

Cornstalk (1720–1777) Native American in the American Revolution

Rev. William Henry Foote, in "Cornstalk, the Shawanee Chief" in The Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 16, Issue 9, (September 1850) pp. 533-540
Context: All savages seem to us alike as the trees of the distant forest. Here and there one unites in his own person, all the excellencies, and becomes the favourable representative of the whole, the image of savage greatness, the one grand character in which all others are lost to history or observation. Cornstalk possessed all the elements of savage greatness, oratory, statesmanship and heroism, with beauty of person and strength of frame. In appearance he was majestic, in manners easy and winning. Of his oratory, Colonel Benjamin Wilson, Senr., an officer in Dunmore's army, in 1774, having heard the grand speech to Dunmore in Camp Charlotte, says — "I have heard the first orators in Virginia, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, but never have I heard one whose powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on that occasion." Of his statesmanship and bravery there is ample evidence both in the fact that he was chosen head of the Confederacy, and in the manner he conducted the war of 1774, and particularly by his directions of the battle at Point Pleasant.

History , Tree , Distant , Personality

“Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public.”

Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) French actress

The Art of the Theatre (1925), p. 171
Context: Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. And to this end the actor must forget his personality and throw aside his joys and sorrows. He must present the public with the reality of a being who for him is only a fiction. With his own eyes, he must shed the tears of the other. With his own voice, he must groan the anguish of the other. His own heart beats as if it would burst, for it is the other's heart that beats in his heart. And when he retires from a tragic or dramatic scene, if he has properly rendered his character, he must be panting and exhausted.

“The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition.”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)
Context: The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition. In addition it depends upon a special technical capacity for such-and-such a manufacture, a special aptitude for meeting the peculiarities of such-and-such a market, the efficient equipment of elaborately constructed workshops, and the existence of a population trained to given trades.

People , Nature , Dependency , Country

“Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided. Conscience, the only remaining tie, is known to be inadequate in individuals: In large numbers, little is to be expected from it.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Madison's own notes on Madison's remarks of debate (6 June 1787) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_606.asp
1780s, The Debates in the Federal Convention (1787)
Context: In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger. What motives are to restrain them? A prudent regard to the maxim that honesty is the best policy is found by experience to be as little regarded by bodies of men as by individuals. Respect for character is always diminished in proportion to the number among whom the blame or praise is to be divided. Conscience, the only remaining tie, is known to be inadequate in individuals: In large numbers, little is to be expected from it. Besides, Religion itself may become a motive to persecution & oppression. — These observations are verified by the Histories of every Country antient & modern. In Greece & Rome the rich & poor, the creditors & debtors, as well as the patricians & plebians alternately oppressed each other with equal unmercifulness. What a source of oppression was the relation between the parent cities of Rome, Athens & Carthage, & their respective provinces: the former possessing the power, & the latter being sufficiently distinguished to be separate objects of it? Why was America so justly apprehensive of Parliamentary injustice? Because G. Britain had a separate interest real or supposed, & if her authority had been admitted, could have pursued that interest at our expence. We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. What has been the source of those unjust laws complained of among ourselves? Has it not been the real or supposed interest of the major number? Debtors have defrauded their creditors. The landed interest has borne hard on the mercantile interest. The Holders of one species of property have thrown a disproportion of taxes on the holders of another species. The lesson we are to draw from the whole is that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure. In a Republican Govt. the Majority if united have always an opportunity. The only remedy is to enlarge the sphere, & thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests & parties, that in the 1st. place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the 2d. place, that in case they shd. have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was incumbent on us then to try this remedy, and with that view to frame a republican system on such a scale & in such a form as will controul all the evils wch. have been experienced.

“The old phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"*, represents a true ideal. It is best for the people as a whole. It is even more clearly the best for the development of the individual man and woman. And since in the end, the character and the prosperity of the nation depend on the character of the individuals that compose it, the form of government which best promotes individual development is the best for the people as a whole.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Quoting Abraham Lincoln
The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: In some states of society it may even be that a form of dictatorship is necessary. No doubt in the hands of an able man it may possibly be more efficient than a democratic form of administration. But in the end, I am confident that a free government is best for free people. The old phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"*, represents a true ideal. It is best for the people as a whole. It is even more clearly the best for the development of the individual man and woman. And since in the end, the character and the prosperity of the nation depend on the character of the individuals that compose it, the form of government which best promotes individual development is the best for the people as a whole.

People , Dependency

“Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

“Confusing ‘Character’ with ‘Temperament’”
Clearing the Ground (1986)
Context: Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters.
We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable. Of course, the optimum for a person is to possess both an easy temperament and a strong character, but this is a rare combination, and few of us are that lucky. The people who get things done tend to be prickly, and the people we enjoy being with tend to be accepting, and there seems to be no way to get around this. Obviously, there are many combinations of character and temperament, in varying degrees, so that this is only a rough generalization — but I think it is one worth remembering when we make personal judgments.

“My argument against the dissolution of the American Union is this. It would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slave-holding states, and withdraw it from the power in the northern states which is opposed to slavery. Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. While in the Union it will meet with both. Its hope of life, in the last resort, is to get out of the Union. I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of the Union more completely under the power of the free states. What they most dread, that I most desire”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)
Context: My argument against the dissolution of the American Union is this. It would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slave-holding states, and withdraw it from the power in the northern states which is opposed to slavery. Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. While in the Union it will meet with both. Its hope of life, in the last resort, is to get out of the Union. I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of the Union more completely under the power of the free states. What they most dread, that I most desire. I have much confidence in the instincts of the slaveholders. They see that the Constitution will afford slavery no protection when it shall cease to be administered by slaveholders. They see, moreover, that if there is once a will in the people of America to abolish slavery, this is no word, no syllable in the Constitution to forbid that result. They see that the Constitution has not saved slavery in Rhode Island, in Connecticut, in New York, or Pennsylvania; that the Free States have only added three to their original number. There were twelve Slave States at the beginning of the Government: there are fifteen now.

Life , Hope , Drawing

“Our most valuable real estate is our character”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 79.
1927
Context: I may confess to men here, of a stock so largely English, that our English intelligence is sometimes apt to be despised by nations that think they are quicker-witted than we are. Our most valuable real estate is our character— its steadiness, its reliability, its personal integrity, its capacity for toleration and for a quiet, humorous boredom with things. The general strike in England, which was not without its alarming aspects, illustrated all these qualities in our people.

“It took three attempts in Germany to enable a coup d'état of nationalist forces to achieve such success that it could be given the character of an irresistible mass movement, a national revolution. All three attempts used the same tactics of ‘grafting revolutionary violence on constitutional legality.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 4

Success

“After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)
Context: After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people.

Travel

“Colorful, charismatic characters often fascinate people, even soldiers. But over time, effectiveness is what counts. Those who lead most successfully do so while looking out for their followers' welfare.”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Source: My Share Of The Task (2013), p. 393-394
Context: All leaders are human. They get tired, angry, and jealous and carry the same range of emotions and frailties common to mankind. Most leaders periodically display them. The leaders I most admired were totally human but constantly strove to be the best humans they could be. Leaders make mistakes, and they are often costly. The first reflex is normally to deny the failure to themselves; the second is to hide it from others, because most leaders covet a reputation for infallibility. But it's a fool's dream and inherently dishonest. There are few secrets to leadership. It is mostly just hard work. More than anything else it requires self-discipline. Colorful, charismatic characters often fascinate people, even soldiers. But over time, effectiveness is what counts. Those who lead most successfully do so while looking out for their followers' welfare.

People , Color , Time

“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

Dependency

“A point highly illustrative of the character of Faraday now comes into view.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

"Points of Character", p. 37.
Faraday as a Discoverer (1868)
Context: A point highly illustrative of the character of Faraday now comes into view. He gave an account of his discovery of Magneto-electricity in a letter to his friend M. Hachette, of Paris, who communicated the letter to the Academy of Sciences. The letter was translated and published; and immediately afterwards two distinguished Italian philosophers took up the subject, made numerous experiments, and published their results before the complete memoirs of Faraday had met the public eye. This evidently irritated him. He reprinted the paper of the learned Italians in the Philosophical Magazine accompanied by sharp critical notes from himself. He also wrote a letter dated Dec. 1,1832, to Gay Lussac, who was then one of the editors of the Annales de Chimie in which he analysed the results of the Italian philosophers, pointing out their errors, and' defending himself from what he regarded as imputations on his character. The style of this letter is unexceptionable, for Faraday could not write otherwise than as a gentleman; but the letter shows that had he willed it he could have hit hard. We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete. You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion. "He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts.

“Sometimes the character of the mistress is inferred from the dress of her maids.”
Interdum animus dominarum ex ancillarum habitu iudicatur.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 54
Letters

“No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Duty of Inquiry
Context: No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.
Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.

Training

“Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Introduction
The Wedge (1944)
Context: Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

“Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Preface, in A Trail of Memories : The Quotations Of Louis L'Amour (1988) by Angelique L'Amour
Context: Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being. Once characters are established, they become their own persons and the ideas of the characters are such ideas as they might have acquired in the circumstances of their daily existence.

Life , Way , Time

“The most marvelous and far-reaching change which man ever undergoes is in his moral character and spiritual nature.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 33
Context: The most significant change in a man is not the change in his bodily strength or mental capacity. The most marvelous and far-reaching change which man ever undergoes is in his moral character and spiritual nature.

Nature , Change

“The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Duty of Inquiry
Context: The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me. Men speak the truth of one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other's mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe thing because I want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleasant? Will he not learn to cry, "Peace," to me, when there is no peace? By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbours ready to deceive. The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are.

Truth , Support , Falseness

“Education has for its object the formation of character.”

Herbert Spencer book Social Statics

Pt. II, Ch. 17 : The Rights of Children
Social Statics (1851)
Context: Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature — this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

Education

Quotes about character page 25

Quotes about character
page 25