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Quotes about character

276 quotes from 175 people

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The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Roland Barthes1915–1980Mythologies (1957), p. 151
“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”
L. Frank Baum1856–1919The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Chapter XVIn context
- Comedy
What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.
Samuel Beckett1906–1989Molloy (1951)
A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with — a man is what he makes of himself.
Alexander Graham Bell1847–1922Bell Telephone Talk (1901)
What I stand for
is what I stand on.
Wendell Berry1934–2026“Below” in A Part (1980)
- Nature
Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
Ambrose Bierce1842–1914The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
- Comedy
They treat me like a fox, a cunning fellow (Schlaukopf) of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to do with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.
Otto von Bismarck1815–1898To Gyula Andrássy (18 September 1877), as quoted in R. W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (1935), p. 224
Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.
Anthony Bourdain1956–2018Kitchen Confidential (2000)
If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him. Soldiers must have confidence in their leader.
Omar Bradley1893–1981On military character, in 19 Stars: A Study in Military Character and Leadership (1981) by Edgar F. Puryear Jr.
- Leadership
I prefer to remember Patton as a man, as a man with all the frailties and faults of a human being, as a man whose greatness is therefore all the more of a triumph.
Omar Bradley1893–1981A Soldier’s Story (1951), p. xii
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
Charlotte Brontë1816–1855Jane Eyre (1847), Ch. 27In context
I judge people by what they might be,⁠—not are, nor will be.
Robert Browning1812–1889A Soul’s Tragedy (1846), Act ii.
When the fight begins within himself,
A man’s worth something.
Robert Browning1812–1889Men and Women (1855), “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, line 693.
Character is the entity, the individuality of the person, shining from every window of the soul, either as a beam of purity, or as a clouded ray that betrays the impurity within.
William Jennings Bryan1860–1925Address at Illinois College (1881)
The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.
John Buchan1875–1940Pilgrim’s Way (1940), p. 241