Barry Lopez Quotes

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.

We want the education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one's own feet.

Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.

Woe betide him, and her too, when it comes to things of consequence, when they are placed in circumstances requiring fortitude and strength of mind, if she have not resolution enough to resist idle interference ... It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. You are never sure of a good impression being durable; everybody may sway it. Let those who would be happy be firm.

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

The real test of any church or religion is the kind of men it makes.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

With the tough mind, there must also be a tender heart.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

Affliction is the school in which great virtues are acquired, in which great characters are formed.

Tomorrow's character is made out of today's thoughts. Temptation may come suddenly, but sin does not.

It takes nine months for a baby to develop, it takes nine months to develop a character.

People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them.

All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.

The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.

You are who you are by virtue of the company you keep.

Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.

Anyone who thinks humans are not capable of so fouling their own nest that the land and the waters can no longer be productive just hasn't been paying attention.

Barack Obama now says he is open to offshore oil drilling. So, apparently, when he promised change, he was talking about his mind.

Man's character is the product of his premises.