Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Judging a Man)

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim (1900)

Quote of the Day (Hermann Hesse, on ‘People With Courage and Character’)

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” — German-Swiss Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Demian: A Dual-Language Book, translated by Stanley Appelbaum (1919)

Quote of the Day (Hara Estroff Marano, on Resilience, ‘The Capacity to Adapt’)

“At its core, resilience is the capacity to adapt, to update ourselves, to adjust to new conditions after an unexpected and almost invariably unwanted experience has disrupted our old moorings. It is a necessary capacity for setting up the human tent in an unrelentingly dynamic and often unpredictable world.”— Writer and editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, “9 Ways to Overcome Adversity,” Psychology Today, November/December 2024

Quote of the Day (Albert Einstein, on Weak Character and ‘The Destruction of Our Intellectual Life’)

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.”— Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), speech in honor of Thomas Mann, January 1939, quoted by Abraham Pais, Einstein Lived Here (1994)

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on Character)

“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”—Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist and poet George Santayana (1863-1952), Reason in Common Sense (Vol. 1 of “The Life of Reason”) (1905)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Paine, on How a Nation’s Character ‘Is Much Easier Kept Than Recovered’)

“Let but a nation conceive rightly of its character, and it will be chastely just in protecting it. None ever began with a fairer than America, and none can be under a greater obligation to preserve it….

“With the blessings of peace, independence, and an universal commerce, the states, individually and collectively, will have leisure and opportunity to regulate and establish their domestic concerns, and to put it beyond the power of calumny to throw the least reflection on their honor. Character is much easier kept than recovered, and that man, if any such there be, who, from sinister views, or littleness of soul, lends unseen his hand to injure it, contrives a wound it will never be in his power to heal.”— English-born American patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809), “The Crisis XIII” (“The Last Crisis”), originally printed in The Pennsylvania Packet, Apr. 19, 1783 reprinted in The American Crisis and in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner (Library of America edition, 1995)

Notice that date when this piece was first read by Americans? You would say, correctly, that it was 240 years ago today.

But it was also exactly eight years after shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, plunging the 13 British colonies into a war for independence—a conflict that gave rise to one country dedicated to liberty and that, Thomas Paine assured readers, would inspire the world.

Paine started his essay by quoting the first and best remembered line in the entire series on “The American Crisis” he wrote during the American Revolution, as if closing a circle: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

With a treaty now being negotiated with England to end the hard years of fighting, you can almost see him catching his breath as he lauds what “the blessings of peace, independence, and an universal commerce” would bring his adopted country.

But the sense of ease is short-lived, and the great pamphleteer couldn’t help but warn about the danger to the new nation’s character posed by someone, as yet unknown, who might injure it “from sinister views, or littleness of soul.” That character, so dearly won, can never be retrieved if lost.

For years, it appeared that America, though sometimes mistreating people who came under their sway, would survive the twin temptations of anarchy and autocracy that haunted Paine and other leaders of the revolutionary generation--sailing past the disputed election of 1800, the Civil War, and the Great Depression.

Now, in my gloomiest moments, I worry that Paine’s warning has recently gone unheeded. The insurrection of January 6, 2021 rent America’s reputation as a stable, durable example of a democratic republic where transfers of power were accomplished without violence.

Not only does the figure responsible for that event have (in Paine’s phrase) no “power to heal” the divisions he unleashed, but he shows not the least inclination to want to do so—and, in fact, has promised “retribution” towards those who upheld this nation’s honor by opposing his electoral schemes.

That “art of the steal” also resulted in a powerful global media company afraid to push back against the falsehoods he peddled about the Presidential election of 2020.

Until the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems announced late yesterday afternoon, Fox News seemed ready to risk a trial that could have cost it $1.6 billion—not to mention an adverse ruling that would have trimmed the libel protections long enjoyed by them and other media organizations.

Look at that “blessings of peace” paragraph again. Paine understood that national character could exist as strongly as individual character—that the two were, in fact, inextricably connected.

Nearly a decade later, in The Rights of Man, Paine identified more concretely than before the type of person who could despoil the national character—someone who, already rich, could further profit from his position in the government:

“When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms. Give to any man a million a year, and add thereto the power of creating and disposing of places, at the expense of a country, and the liberties of that country are no longer secure. What is called the splendour of a throne is no other than the corruption of the state.”

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Character)

“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”—American essayist-novelist Joan Didion (1934-2021), Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Quote of the Day (Marcus Aurelius, on ‘The Only Rewards of Our Existence’)

"Make sure you remain straightforward, upright, reverent, serious, unadorned, an ally of justice, pious, kind, affectionate, and doing your duty with a will. Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Revere the gods; watch over human beings. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts." —Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), Meditations: A New Translation, translated by Gregory Hays (The Modern Library, New York, 2003)

The image accompanying this post shows Richard Harris as Marcus Aurelius—as good an example as you can have of a “philosopher-king”—in the Oscar-winning epic Gladiator. I have no idea what Aurelius looked like, let alone whether Harris resembled him physically.

But then again, I doubt whether the statues of Aurelius that I have seen in photos were created from life, either. And at least with Harris, we can behold a face not still and lifeless, but filled with the kind of emotions that made this emperor’s attempt to control and master them all the more poignant.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Dreams, ‘The Touchstones of Our Characters’)

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on How ‘The Force of Character is Cumulative’)

“The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.” —U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self-Reliance," in Essays, First Series (1841)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Character)

“He believed in character. He wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.” —American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “Babylon Revisited,” in Taps at Reveille (1935)

Quote of the Day (Heywood Hale Broun, on Sports and Character)

“Anybody who teaches a skill, which coaches do, is admirable. But sport doesn’t build character. Character is built pretty much by the time you’re six or seven. Sports reveals character. Sports heightens your perceptions. Let that be enough.”—Sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun (1918-2001) quoted in Larry Lockhart, “Broun: ‘I like to See Things Done With Zest,’” Ames (IA) Daily Tribune, Jan. 16, 1974

The above quote has been shortened to “Sports doesn’t build character; it reveals it.” But you get the point—which is worth bearing in mind now, as the Summer Olympics head into the home stretch and various professional teams say goodbye to old (often problematic) players and hello to young (and as yet unknown) ones.

(BTW: I used to catch Broun on CBS Sunday Morning more than three decades ago. His outfit, in the accompanying image, brought back many fond memories of his vivid on-air style, sartorially as well as verbally.) 

Quote of the Day (Charles Barkley, on Tonya Harding and His Character)

"I heard Tonya Harding is calling herself the Charles Barkley of figure skating. I was going to sue her for defamation of character, but then I realized I have no character."—Former NBA star Charles Barkley, quoted in “In Other Words. . . / It's One Thing to Think It; It's Another to Say it; A Selection of Our Favorite Quotations From 1994,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 1995

Quote of the Day (Katharine Hepburn, on Character)

“To keep your character intact, you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.”—Katharine Hepburn, quoted in Reader’s Digest, September 2009

Quote of the Day (James A. Michener, on Character)

“Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”—Novelist James A. Michener, Chesapeake (1986)