Character is who you are when it costs something. These quotes come at it from three directions: what it is, how it’s built, and how it holds up under pressure.
Some draw the line between being good and looking good. Socrates would “rather suffer than do” injustice, because doing wrong harms the doer. Cicero calls hypocrisy, appearing virtuous “at the very moment when he is most false,” the most flagrant injustice of all. And Laozi puts the real test inside: “he who overcomes himself is mighty.”
Most of them agree that character is built, not born. Aristotle says “we become just by doing just acts”; Marcus Aurelius says “the soul is dyed by the thoughts”; William James warns that we soon become “mere walking bundles of habits.” Benjamin Franklin and Seneca each kept a daily review of their own conduct, and Marcus told himself to stop talking about what a good man is “but be such.”
Two show what it looks like under the worst pressure. Frederick Douglass, still enslaved, describes how “a slave was made a man” when he refused to accept another’s verdict on who he was. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, resolved to let no one “narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
Read together, they make character less a matter of reputation and more a matter of practice: small choices, made the same way, until they become who you are.
From his example in this respect I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
But of all forms of injustice, none is more flagrant than that of the hypocrite who, at the very moment when he is most false, makes it his business to appear virtuous.
Cicero, De Officiis (On Duties), Book I, 41 (translated by Walter Miller, 1913), 44 BC
Meaning and context
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
I make use of this privilege, and daily plead my cause before myself: when the lamp is taken out of my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, has ceased to talk, I pass the whole day in review before myself, and repeat all that I have said and done.
Seneca, On Anger, Book III, 36 (translated by Aubrey Stewart, 1889), before AD 65
Meaning and context
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
