Top 40 Character Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “People are interested by talent. God is impressed by character.”

— Rick Warren

2. “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.”

— Billy Graham

Also featured in: Health Quotes

3. “Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.”

— Bruce Lee

Also featured in: Respect Quotes

4. “Habits change into character.”

— Ovid

Also featured in: Habit Quotes

5. “Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.”

— Bill Belichick

6. “The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.”

— Billy Graham

7. “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

— Horace Greeley

8. “Adversity is a crossroads that makes a person choose one of two paths: character or compromise. Every time he chooses character, he becomes stronger, even if that choice brings negative consequences.”

— John C. Maxwell

Also featured in: Adversity Quotes

9. “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”

— Dale Carnegie

Also featured in: Gratitude Quotes

10. “Silver is purified in fire and so are we. It is in the most trying times that our real character is shaped and revealed.”

— Helen Keller

Also featured in: Real Quotes

11. “A man’s character is not judged after he celebrates a victory, but by what he does when his back is against the wall.”

— John Cena

12. “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

13. “A man’s true character comes out when he’s drunk.”

— Charlie Chaplin

14. “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”

— Albert Einstein

Also featured in: Attitude Quotes, Ambition Quotes

15. “Winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.”

— John Wooden

Also featured in: Basketball Quotes

16. “Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.”

— Walter Anderson

Also featured in: Moving On Quotes, Gratitude Quotes, Pain Quotes

17. “Character is far more important than intellect in making a man a good citizen or successful at his calling- meaning by character not only such qualities as honesty and truthfulness, but courage, perseverance and self-reliance.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Also featured in: Honesty Quotes

18. “You can’t just pretend that the things you watch, and the things you hear, and the places you go will not have an impact on your character. They will.”

— Nouman Ali Khan

19. “Your task is to stand straight; not to be held straight.”

— Marcus Aurelius

20. “I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!”

— Theodore Roosevelt

21. “By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character. Grenville Kleiser Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

— Jim Rohn

Also featured in: Greatness Quotes

22. “Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.”

— Anne Frank

23. “Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.”

— Barack Obama

24. “The opposite of compromise is character.”

— Frederick Douglass

25. “The real Da’wah to Islam is the character of a Muslim.”

— Nouman Ali Khan

Also featured in: Real Quotes

26. “A Man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character.”

— Thomas Jefferson

27. “Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.”

— Blaise Pascal

Also featured in: Kindness Quotes

28. “Money is either a good or bad influence, according to the character of the person who possesses it.”

— Napoleon Hill

29. “Some of us are more concerned with our reputation than our character. The latter takes care of the former.”

— Lecrae

30. “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.”

— Thomas Paine

31. “When we deal in generalities, we shall never succeed. When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have a failure. When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of performance accelerates.”

— Thomas S. Monson

32. “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love.”

— Erich Fromm

33. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

— Thomas Paine

34. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Also featured in: Travel Quotes

35. “A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”

— Mark Twain

36. “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Also featured in: Kindness Quotes, Respect Quotes

37. “You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.”

— Napoleon Hill

Also featured in: Ambition Quotes

38. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

— Ernest Hemingway

39. “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”

— Pablo Neruda

Also featured in: Path Quotes

40. “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

— Heraclitus

Also featured in: Leadership Quotes, Quotes About War

41. “Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.”

— Imam Ali

Also featured in: Motivational Quotes, Integrity Quotes, Attitude Quotes, Wisdom Quotes

42. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

— Aristotle

Also featured in: Success Quotes, Persistence Quotes, Discipline Quotes, Habit Quotes

43. “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”

— Albert Einstein

Also featured in: Success Quotes, Inspirational Quotes, Integrity Quotes

44. “Too often character assassination has replaced debate in principle here in Washington. Destroy someone’s reputation, and you don’t have to talk about what he stands for.”

— Ronald Reagan