Willa Cather Quotes

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

I want to be a good person first and a good artist second.

I do not look to Hollywood to give me character clues.

My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started - and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.

Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

Success is not so much what we have as it is what we are.

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it, piece by piece - by thought, choice, courage, and determination.

'As a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles.' The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

We do not need more knowledge, we need more character!

If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.

You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn't.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.

The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self, with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

The person you are matters more than the place to which you go.

Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.

I still don't know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know.

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, they just call it a relationship!

There is dignity in your being even if there's indignity in what you're doing.

Try to be all you can be to be the best human being you can be. Try to be that in your church, in your temple. Try to be that in your classroom. Do it because it is right to do.

How hard you work at correcting your faults reveals your character.