Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Character
Sorrow makes men sincere, and anguish makes them earnest.
Henry Ward Beecher.—The Life of Jesus, The Christ, Chap. XII.
Forget man’s littleness, deserve the best,
God’s mercy in thy thought and life confest.
William E. Channing.—Sleepy Hollow.
Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul,—that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love; and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.
William E. Channing.—Every Man Great.
Character is higher than intellect … A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
Emerson.—The American Scholar.
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.
Emerson.—Character.
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;—
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Emerson.—The Problem.
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.
James A. Garfield.—Oration on Congressman Gustave Schleicher.
If the superior beings of the universe would look down upon the world to find the most interesting object, it would be the unfinished, unformed character of young men, or of young women.
James A. Garfield.—Hiram College, July, 1880.
Not a man of iron, but of live oak.
James A. Garfield.—Oration on George H. Thomas.
Thought, conscience, will,—to make them all thy own
He rent a pillar from the eternal throne.
Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create.
Holmes.—The Professor of the Breakfast Table, Chap. II.
When a strong brain is weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble against a wedge of gold.
Holmes.—The Professor of the Breakfast Table, Chap. XII.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.
Abraham Lincoln.—Second Inaugural Address.
Be to the best thou knowest ever true.
Margaret Fuller Ossoli.—Summer on the Lakes: Sub Rosa Crux.
It is of little traits that the greatest human character is composed.
William Winter.—English Rambles, Part II. Chap. II.