Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

It is of little traits that the greatest human character is composed.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

There is no better indicators of character than the books you have.

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

The history of mankind is his character.

Character contributes to beauty.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

It is as common for tastes to change as it is uncommon for traits of character.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

What you love and what you hate reveal what you are.

Character is itself a fortune.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

Using the stratagem of defining character by what changes and what remains the same, the one constant always seems to be regret. We are defined by the objects of our regret.

Our passions are ourselves.

Personality, too, is destiny.

Mortals are equal; their mask differs.

Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed.