Character Quotes

• "It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species."
  By: Henry Fielding
  Character Quotes
• "A great character, founded on the living rock of principle is, in fact, not a solitary phenomenon, to be at once perceived, limited, and described. It is a dispensation of Providence, designed to have not merely an immediate, but a continuous, progressive, and never-ending agency. It survives the man who possessed it; survives his age,--and perhaps, his country, his language."
  By: Edward Everett, Speech--The Youth of Washington
  Character Quotes
• "Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all; only our characters are steadfast, not our gold."
  By: Euripides
  Character Quotes
• "Character is higher than intellect. . . . A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think."
  By: Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Scholar
  Character Quotes
• "This is that which we call character,--a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means."
  By: Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Character Quotes
• "The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart."
  By: Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Character Quotes
• "A trip-hammer, with Aeolian attachment."
  By: Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Carlyle, after meeting him
  Character Quotes
• "Character is not cut in marble; it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do."
  By: George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans Cross)
  Character Quotes
• "Plain without pomp, and rich without a show."
  By: John Dryden, The Flower and the Leaf (l. 187)
  Character Quotes
• "Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace."
  By: John Dryden, Epistle to Congreve (l. 19)
  Character Quotes
• "Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child."
  By: John Dryden, Elegy on Mrs. Killigrew (l. 70)
  Character Quotes
• "For every inch that is not fool, is rogue."
  By: John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (pt. II, l. 463)
  Character Quotes
• "So over violent, or over civil, That every man with him was God or Devil."
  By: John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (pt. I, l. 557)
  Character Quotes
• "A man so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong. Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon."
  By: John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (pt. I, l. 545)
  Character Quotes
• "Men of light and leading."
  By: Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, Sybil (bk. V, ch. I)
  Character Quotes
• "Characters never change. Opinions alter,--characters are only developed."
  By: Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
  Character Quotes