Character Quotes

Character
Moral character or character is an evaluation of a person’s moral and mental qualities. Such an evaluation is subjective — one person may evaluate someone’s character on the basis of their virtue, another may consider their fortitude, courage, loyalty, honesty, or piety.

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Our characters are the result of our conduct.
o Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (c. 335 B.C.).

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Wherever a man goes to dwell his character goes with him. Every man’s character is good in his own eyes.
o Anonymous

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
o Helen Adams Keller

Character is destiny.
o Heraclitus

There’s no question that character counts. Character counts today, it counted a century ago and it will count a century from now. It’s absolutely critical because you’re reflecting some basic beliefs of honor, integrity, and those different elements of life that will aid you in progressing and frankly, [you'll get] in trouble if you don’t believe in ‘em.
o Milton Ward

Character is the ability to carry out a worthy decision after the emotion of making that decision has passed.
o Hyrum W. Smith

I believe people who are in a position of visibility and leadership affect the character of young people and individuals who look to them as leaders. And in some respects, just as important as their policies and positions is their character and their substance. What for me makes people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and John Adams and George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan such extraordinary leaders is that they had integrity through and through. What they were on the inside and what they said on the outside was harmonious. There a lot of people like that. I think that if people try to live a very different personal life not consistent with the role they’ve assumed as a governor or senator or president, we lose something as a nation.
o Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in the September 2005 The Atlantic

Character does count. For too long we have gotten by in a society that says the only thing right is to get by and the only thing wrong is to get caught. Character is doing what’s right when nobody is looking…
o Oklahoma Congressman J. C. Watts, speech at the Republican National Convention (August 13, 1996)

“Knowledge will give you power, but character, respect.”
o Bruce Lee