Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A big part of honesty is self-discipline, personal resolve, and taking pride in who you are as a person and what each action means to your character.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

The strongest thing that any human being has going is their own integrity and their own heart. As soon as you start veering away from that, the solidity that you need in order to be able to stand up for what you believe in and deliver what's really inside, it's just not going to be there.

I would always encourage people of any age not to be so quick to follow other people's truths but to search and follow your own moral code and live by your own integrity, and mostly just be brave.

Fame and success and titles stay with you, but they wear out eventually. In the end, all that you are left with is your character.

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

My beliefs will run through everything I do. My beliefs, my values are my anchor and when people try to drag me, as I know they will, it is to that sense of right and wrong, that sense of who I am and what I believe, to which I will always hold.

Character, not circumstances, makes the man.

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.

I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values - and follow my own moral compass - then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms.

I have one rule I live by: Only do what you can do. That neans you're never looking outside for what's popular; you're always looking inside for what's true.

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

There is need of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character-the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man thatstands by himself, the universe stands by him also.

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above is character.

A meaningful life is not a popularity contest. Do what in your heart you believe to be the right thing, and you may or may not get immediate approval from the world. Do it anyway.

Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.

Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality.

All one can do for one's character in times like these, is to prove that one does not belong to these times.

The biggest challenge, I think, is always maintaining your moral compass.

He might be a man without character, but she was a woman without courage. Of the two, which was worse?