God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.
– Rick Warren
Character | The Bible | Circumstances
We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it’s a continuing choice.
– John C. Maxwell
Character | Attitude | Choices
Character is what a man is in the dark.
– Dwight L. Moody
Character
Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Character | Strength
Character is both developed and revealed by tests, and all of life is a test.
– Rick Warren
Character
When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.
– Billy Graham
Wealth | Health | Character
No man is poor who does not think himself so. But if in a full fortune with impatience he desires more, he proclaims his wants and his beggarly condition.
– Jeremy Taylor
Character | Impatience
God is far more interested in what you are than who you are.
– Rick Warren
Character
What happens outwardly in your life is not as important as what happens inside you. Your circumstances are temporary, but your character will last forever.
– Rick Warren
Character | Circumstances
Inside every human being there are treasures to unlock.
– Mike Huckabee
Character
Great character, like massive roots, grow deep when water is sparse and winds are strong.
– Charles Swindoll
Character
Every problem is a character-building opportunity, and the more difficult it is, the greater the potential for building spiritual muscle and moral fiber.
– Rick Warren
Character
Cheerfulness is the friend and helper of all good graces, and the absence of it is certainly a vice.
– James H. Aughey
Character | Cheerfulness
It is not the situation which makes the man, but the man who makes the situation. The slave may be a freeman. The monarch may be a slave. Situations are noble or ignoble, as we make them.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Character
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Character | Comfort
The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.
– Helen Keller
Character | Vision
Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.
– Billy Graham
Character | Mothers
Never decide on anything or start to do anything while emotion is agitating like a roaring sea. Again, during that time even our conscience is rendered unreliable.
– Watchman Nee
Character | Conscience
Character will take you further than knowledge.
– Jack Wellman
Holiness | Character
Doctrine is useless if it is not accompanied by a holy life. It is worse than useless; it does positive harm. Something of ‘the image of Christ’ must be seen and observed by others in our private life, and habits, and character, and doings.
– J. C. Ryle
Doctrine | Character
If God gave us the strength in the past, He will supply what we need for future challenges.
– Crystal McDowell
Character | Faith
The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.
– George Macdonald
Character
Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
– Blaise Pascal
Character
God develops the fruit of the Spirit in your life by allowing you to experience circumstances in which you’re tempted to express the exact opposite quality. Character development always involves a choice, and temptation provides that opportunity.
– Rick Warren
Circumstances | Character | Choices
God never alters the robe of righteousness to fit the man. Rather He alters the man to fit the robe.
– John Hagee
Character | Righteousness | Conversion
A keen sense of humor helps us to overlook the unbecoming, understand the unconventional, tolerated the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected, and outlast the unbearable.
– Billy Graham
Character
Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation. It is better be alone than in bad company.
– George Washington
Friendship | Character | Men
You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.
– Leonard Ravenhill
Character | Reading
As the excellence of steel is strength, and the excellence of art is beauty, so the excellence of mankind is moral character.
– A. W. Tozer
Character
It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.
– Zig Ziglar
Character | Commitment | Discipline
Cheerfulness sharpens the edge and removes the rust from the mind. A joyous heart supplies oil to our inward machinery, and makes the whole of our powers work with ease and efficiency; hence it is of the utmost importance that we maintain a contented, cheerful, genial disposition.
– James H. Aughey
Character | Cheerfulness
The swift wind of compromise is a lot more devastating than the sudden jolt of misfortune.
– Chuck Swindoll
Character | Compromise
The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
– Francois Fenelon
Character
Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.
– Zig Ziglar
Character | America
Sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead; but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love, is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, and the blessedness and only proper life of man.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Character | Sacrifice
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever; do noble things, not dream them all day long; and so make life, death, and that vast forever one grand, sweet song.
– Charles Kingsley
Character
Consider how impossible nobility of character would be if our goodness were untried innocence instead of victorious virtue.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Character | Virtue | Victory
It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot.
– George Washington
Character
A fair reputation is a plant delicate in its nature, and by no means rapid in its growth. It will not shoot up in a night, like the gourd of the prophet, but like that gourd, it may perish in a night.
– Jeremy Taylor
Character | Nature | Growth
The testimony of the lips indicates the state of the heart.
– Harry Ironside
Character | The Heart
There is no such thing as “best” in the world of individuals.
– Hosea Ballou
Character
Certainly this is a duty, not a sin. “Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.”
– John Wesley
Character | Godliness
Unspeakable sorrow usually follows upon hilarious joy, great depression after high excitement, deep withdrawal after burning fervor. Even in the matter of love, it may commence as such but due to some emotional alteration it may end up with a hatred whose intensity far exceeds the earlier love.
– Watchman Nee
Character | Hatred | Depression
The wise man considers what he wants and the fool what he abounds in.
– Assorted Authors
Character | Foolishness
You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.
– Zig Ziglar
Character | Attitude
It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Character
If lips and life do not agree, the testimony will not amount to much.
– Harry Ironside
Character
Your commitments can develop you or destroy you, but either way, they will define you.
– Rick Warren
Character | Commitment
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
– Isaac Newton
Character
Change always starts in your mind. The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act.
– Rick Warren
Character | Change
A slowness to applaud betrays a cold temper or an envious spirit.
– Hannah More
Character | Envy
All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
– Blaise Pascal
Character | Surrender
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
– Blaise Pascal
Character
A test of a Christian’s character is what he does after he comes to the blockade in the road and what his attitude is after everything has left him except Jesus.
– Lester Roloff
Character | Attitude
God is interested in developing your character. At times He lets you proceed, but He will never let you go too far without discipline to bring you back. In your relationship with God, He may let you make a wrong decision. Then the Spirit of God causes you to recognize that it is not God’s will. He guides you back to the right path.
– Henry Blackaby
Character | Discipline
Your reputation is what people say about you. Your character is what God and your wife know about you.
– Billy Sunday
Character
What you are is what it takes to stop you.
– Jack Hyles
Character
No man can quench his thirst with sand, or with water from the Dead Sea; so no man can find rest from his own character, however good, or from his own acts, however religious.
– Horatius Bonar
Character
Speak but little and well if you would be esteemed a man of merit.
– Richard Chenevix Trench
Character
Zeal without humanity is like a ship without a rudder, liable to be stranded at any moment.
– Owen Feltham
CharacterZeal
Some are so uncharitable as to think all women bad, and others are so credulous as to believe they are all good. All will grant her corporeal frame more wonderful and more beautiful than man’s. And can we think God would put a worse soul into her better body?
– Owen Feltham
CharacterBeautyWomen
What is the creed of the Agnostic, but the confession of the spiritual numbness of humanity?
– Henry Drummond
Character
Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.
– George Macdonald
Character
Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Character | Gratitude
One must not hold one’s self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one’s creations.
– Assorted Authors
Character
Under the right conditions it is as natural for character to become beautiful as for a flower; and if on God’s earth there is not some machinery for affecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been forgotten. This is simply what man was made for. With Browning: “I say that Man was made to grow, not stop.”
– Henry Drummond
Character
There is a beauty bestowed in some degree on all God’s saints who pray much which is of the same nature and is the most precious of all answers to prayer. Character flows from the well-spring of prayer.
– James Stalker
Character | Prayer
Should we take the trouble to observe ourselves we will easily perceive how changeful are our feelings. Few matters in the world are as changeable as emotion. We can be one way one minute and feel quite opposite the next. He therefore who lives by emotion lives without principle.
– Watchman Nee
Character | Feelings
Before the self is touched God’s children live by very changeable stimulations and sensations. That is why they exhibit a wavy up-and-down existence.
– Watchman Nee
Character
I have not so great a struggle with my vices, great and numerous as they are, as I have with my impatience. My efforts are not absolutely useless; yet I have never been able to conquer this ferocious wild beast.
– John Calvin
Character | Struggles | Impatience
One great power of sin is that it blinds men so that they do not recognize its true character.
– Andrew Murray
Character | Sin | Men
If an ass goes traveling he will not come home a horse.
– Thomas Fuller
Character
The Bible indicates that our thought lives ultimately determine our character. Solomon said, “For as he thinks within himself, so he is”.
– Jerry Bridges
Character
It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
– Oswald Chambers
Character
None love to speak so much, when the mood of speaking comes, as they who are naturally taciturn.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Character
Man’s mind occupies a large place in his life because his thought easily influences his action.
– Watchman Nee
Character
Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.
– Hosea Ballou
Character
A talkative fellow may be compared to an unbraced drum, which beats a wise man out of his wits. Loquacity is ever running, and almost incurable.
– Owen Feltham
Character
One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Character | Laughter
Man is at the bottom an animal, midway, a citizen, and at the top, divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Character
It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
– George Macdonald
Character
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Character
The true boundary of man is moderation. When once we pass that pale, our guardian angel quits his charge of us.
– Owen Feltham
CharacterAngels
Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.
– Thomas Fuller
Character
Good taste rejects excessive nicety; it treats little things as little things, and is not hurt by them.
– Francois Fenelon
Character | Hurt
It is impossible to be our best at the supreme moment if character is corroded and eaten into by daily inconsistency, unfaithfulness, and besetting sin.
– F.B. Meyer
Character
My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty. it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.
– George Washington
Character
Imitation causes us to leave natural ways to enter into artificial ones; it therefore makes slaves.
– Alexandre Vinet
Character
One great power of sin is that it blinds men so that they do not recognize its true character.
– Andrew Murray
Character | Sin | Men
In common discourse we denominate persons and things according to the major part of their character; he is to be called a wise man who has but few follies.
– Isaac Watts
Character | Wisdom
Men are like wine; not good before the lees of clownishness be settled.
– Owen Feltham
Character | Men
If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me.
– Dwight L. Moody
Character
Character grows in the stream of the world’s life. That chiefly is where men are to learn love.
– Henry Drummond
Character
Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance together to make the perfect man. This method of sanctification, nevertheless, is in the true direction. It is only in the details of execution that it fails.
– Henry Drummond
Character | Sanctification
All the energies generated in the soul including talent, gift, knowledge and wisdom, cannot enable believers to bear spiritual fruit.
– Watchman Nee
Character
He has brought himself to this state; he has exposed his heart as a common road to every evil influence of the world, till it has become hard as a pavement.
– Richard Chenevix Trench
Character
Undertake not what you cannot perform but be careful to keep your promise.
– George Washington
Character
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
– Tim Keller
Character | marriage
Before a saint arrives at the stage of spirituality he is sure to be dwelling in a mixed condition. Not content with a quietude in his spirit, he will seek a joyous feeling.
– Watchman Nee
Character | Joy
An exquisite watch went irregularly, though no defect could be discovered in it. At last it was found that the balance wheel had been near a magnet; and here was all the mischief. If the soundest mind be magnetized by any predilection, it must act irregularly.
– Richard Cecil
Character