Paracelsus Quotes

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.

There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.

You don't know what people are really like until they're under a lot of stress.

Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him.

Football doesn't build character, it reveals character.

The test of our religion is whether it fits us to meet emergencies. A man has no more character than he can command in a time of crisis.

It's easy to enjoy your job and enjoy other people when things are going good. When you're faced with adversity is when the character of men is measured. There's a Mennonite proverb, 'Man, like a tree, is measured best when cut down.'

I find that whoever you are as a person is how you're gonna fight, and every basic instinct kind of comes out at that moment.

Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.

The maxims of men reveal their characters.

There is no better test of character than when you're tossed into crisis. That's when we see one's true colors shine through. So I try my best to make my characters personally involved in the plot, in a way that stresses them and tests them.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

If you put people in a corner, you see what their character really is.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

A man's character is his fate.

Occasions do not make a man either strong or weak but they show what he is.

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities

The force of character is cumulative.

Prosperity is a more refined and severer test of character than adversity as one hour of summer sunshine produces greater corruption than the longest winter day.

We talk about that a lot: how, when you're under pressure, it brings out the best and the worst in people.

(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.

Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.

There is no telling what a human character is. Until the test comes. To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them. It may be the straight way, it may be the crooked way --- whichever it is, a man usually learns early just what he is made of.

What will tell in the end will be character and not a knowledge of letters.

The depth and strength of our character is defined by our moral code. People only reveal themselves when they're thrown out of the usual conditions of their lives. That's when the truth of who they are is revealed.