Character is the centrality, the impossibility of being dis placed or overset. 658 Emerson Essays. Character. Character is the habit of action from the permanent vision of truth. It carries a superiority to all the accidents of life. It compels right relation to every other man, — domesticates itself with strangers and enemies. 659 Emerson Essays. Character. 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. 660 Emerson Essays. Self-Reliance. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit. 661 Emerson: Conduct of Life. Culture. Every one of us, whatever our speculative opinions, know better than he practises, and recognizes a better law than he obeys. 662 cause, Froude: Short Studies on Great Subjects. On Character is the chief element, for it is both a result and a Character is the chief element, for it is both a result and a cause, the result of all the elements and forces that combine to form it, and the chief cause of all that is accomplished by its possession. 664 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Address, Hiram College, Hiram, O., June 22, 1876. Almeda A. Booth: her Life and Character. Character... is the result of two great forces: the initial force which the Creator gave it when he called the man into being, and the force of all the external influence and culture that mould and modify the development of a life. 665 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Not a man of iron, but of live oak. 666 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Oration, Cleveland, O., Nov. 25, 1870. On Gen. George H. Thomas. To be capable of steady friendship and lasting love, are the two greatest proofs not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind. 667 Hazlitt: Characteristics. No. 235. Character is the result of a system of stereotyped prin tiples. 668 Heine: Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos. On Poland. Character is a great word, one of the greatest. 669 Roswell D. Hitchcock: Eternal Atonement. XVII. Charge to a Pastor. Life is continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. 670 Lowell: My Study Windows. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. The character itself should be, to the individual, a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go farther than all things else toward making human life happy, both in the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning of rendering life not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant, but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have. 671 John Stuart Mill: System of Logic. Of the Logic of Practice, or Art. Bk. vi. Ch. 12. The middle of life is the testing-ground of character and strength. There are many who hold a foremost place in the heat of youth, but sink behind when that first energy is played out; and there are many whose follies happily die, and whose true strength is only known when serious existence with its weights and responsibilities comes upon them. Many are the revelations of this sober age. 672 Mrs. Oliphant: Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Ch. 5. (English Men of Letters.) Character cannot be constructed. It cannot be put to gether. It needs first of all a principle that is animated, and one, therefore, that is animating. It wants an impulse more glowing, determined, and passionate than anything we are possessed of naturally. 673 Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. II. Human Spirit and Divine Inspiration. Character is impulse that has been reined down into steady continuance. 674 Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. VI. Methodical Piety. It is a great, stalwart soul that qualifies a man to think great, stalwart thoughts; and if you have not such a soul, come as close as you can to a man who has, and you will become richer without his being made poorer. 675 Charles H. Parkhurst: Sermons. III. Coming to the Truth. The most perfect and best of all characters, in my estimation, is his who is as ready to pardon the moral errors of mankind as if he were every day guilty of some himself, and at the same time as cautious of committing a fault as if he never forgave one. 676 Pliny the Younger: Letters. Bk. viii. Letter 22. To Geminus. (Melmoth and Bosanquet, Translators.) Character is the governing element in life, and is above genius. 677 Frederick Saunders: Stray Leaves of Literature. Moral beauty comprehends two distinct elements equally beautiful, justice and charity. 678 Schiller Essays, Esthetical and Philosophical. Introduction. (Bolin edition.) I'm called away by particular business, but I leave my character behind me. 679 Sheridan: The School for Scandal. Act ii. Sc. 2. Character is property. 680 Samuel Smiles: Character. Ch. 1. A man without character and a type of thought of his own, may appear to be many things but in reality is little more than nothing. 681 John Sterling: Essays and Tales. Critical Essays. On Montaigne. In the stormy current of life, characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface. 682 Taine: The Ideal in Art. Sec. ii. 1. Character is a thing that will take care of itself; and all character that does not take care of itself is either very weak or utterly fictitious. 683 Timothy Titcomb (J. G. Hollard): Gold-Foil. Firmness, steadiness of principle, a just moderation, and unconquerable perseverance are the virtues the practice of which is most likely to correct whatever is wrong in the constitution of the social system. 684 Daniel Webster: Miscellaneous Letters. To Citizens of Newburyport, Mass., May 15, 1850. A good man's character is the world's common legacy. Whittier Recreations and Miscellanies. England under James II. 685 A great character greatly successful, shining in its righteous eminence and irradiating a beneficent grace, implies the divine element and the celestial future of mankind. 686 William Winter: Stage Life of Mary Anderson. Fate is character. William Winter: The Stage Life of Mary Anderson. It is of little traits that the greatest human character is composed. 688 CHARITY William Winter: English Rambles. Pt. ii. Ch. 2. see Cowardice, Pride, Virtue. Charity is a virtue of the heart and not of the hands. No. 166. The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess, neither can angel or man come in danger by it. 690 Bacon: Essays. Goodness. Never let your zeal outrun your charity; the former is but human, the latter is divine. 691 Hosea Ballou : MSS. Sermon. This I think charity, to love God for himself, and our neighbor for God. 692 Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici. Pt. ii. Sec. 14. Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable. 693 Colton: Lacon. Some readily find out that where there is distress there is vice, and easily discover the crime of feeding the lazy or encouraging the dissolute. To promote vice is certainly unlawful; but we do not always encourage vice when we relieve the vicious. 694 Johnson: Works. IX. 393. (Oxford edition, 1825.) True charity arises from faith in the promises of God, and expects rewards only in a future state. To hope for our recompense in this life is not beneficence but usury. 695 Johnson: Works. IX. 322. (Oxford edition, 1825.) Charity draws down a blessing on the charitable. 696 Le Sage: Gil Blas. Bk. i. Ch. 17. (Smollett, Trans.) Charity is a naked child, giving honey to a bee without wings; naked, because excuseless and simple; a child, because tender and growing; giving honey, because honey is pleasant and comfortable; to a bee, because a bee is laborious and deserving; without wings, because helpless and wanting. If thou deniest to such, thou killest a bee; if thou givest to other than such, thou preservest a drone. 697 Quarles: Enchiridion. Cent. II. No. 2. The right Christian mind will find its own image wherever it exists, it will seek for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens and caves, and it will believe in its being often when it cannot see it, and always turn away its eyes from beholding vanity; and so it will lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard and black and broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catching light for them to make them fair, and that must be a steep and unkindly crag indeed which it cannot cover. 698 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Pt. iii. Sec. i. Ch. 14. Charity, in whatever guise she appears, is the best-natured and the best-complexioned thing in the world. 699 Frederick Saunders: Stray Leaves of Literature. This is one bad effect of a good character, it invites application from the unfortunate, and there needs no small degree of address to gain the reputation of benevolence without incurring the expense. The silver ore of pure charity is an expensive article in the catalogue of a man's good qualities. 700 Sheridan: The School for Scandal. Act v. Sc. 1. The charity that thinketh no evil trusts in God and trusts in men. 701 Timothy Titcomb (J. G. Holland): Gold-Foil. If charity denies its birth and parentage, if it turns infidel to the great doctrines of the Christian religion, if it turns unbeliever, it is no longer charity. There is no longer charity, either in a Christian sense or in the sense of jurisprudence, for it separates itself from the fountain of its own creation. Daniel Webster: Speech, Supreme Court at Washington, Feb. 20, 1844. The Christian Ministry and the Religious Instruction of the Young. 702 see Temperance. The very ice of chastity is in them. 703 Shakespeare: As You Like It. Act iii. Sc. 4. It lies in our own power to attune the mind to cheerfulness. 704 Auerbach: On the Heights. (Bennett, Translator.) |