Talk:Character

How about novels' characters?

Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

Unsourced

If you lose money, you lose nothing, If you lose time, you lose some thing, If you lose character you lose every thing.
- Swami Vivekananda

Who hasn't despised a grand realization only because it didn't stamp your own name there on the first line? Who of us didn't feel disdain about the good and the beauty only because they seemed to be far, apparently far from our reach? How many of us haven't given up the production only because the harvest wouldn't be ours, and how many of us haven't chosen the low quality of acts and words only because it would be the other ones who were going to be served and who were going to listen to us? Who hasn't stolen, who hasn't misused, or hurt, or cursed, who hasn't gotten even in someone else the frustration that's overdue only by you? Who hasn't tasted the strength and weakness of someone else and in both cases felt yourself humiliated or presumptuous without paying attention of the own value? Who hasn't hurt or offended someone when being offended or hurt? But who has eased someone else's pain when the own heart is fulfilled with the personal joy? Who has chosen to stay beside the foreign pain when the own heart is full of fleeting and individualistic happiness? How many of us haven't chosen the weight in the conscience instead of the freedom that lives in the loyalty and in the truth?
- Patricky Field

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

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
- Jean Paul

Even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.
- Earl of Chesterfield

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.
- Milton Ward

Character is the ability to carry out a worthy decision after the emotion of making that decision has passed.
- 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.
- 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...
- Oklahoma Congressman J. C. Watts, speech at the Republican National Convention (August 13, 1996).

No man knows of what stuff he is made until prosperity and ease try him.
- A. P. Gouthey

" Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing; only character endures."
- Horace Greeley