Philosophy on character

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

“The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.”

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

“Character is destiny.”

“The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”

“Follow the seasons of Ha, / Ride in the state carriage of Yau, / Wear the ceremonial cap of Chan, / Let the music be the Shiu with its pantomimes.”

“Variation: To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.”

“A man living without conflicts, as if he never lives at all.”

“The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.”

“The way of the superior man may be found, in its simple elements, in the intercourse of common men and women; but in its utmost reaches, it shines brightly through Heaven and Earth.”

“The Path is not far from man. When men try to pursue a course, which is far from the common indications of consciousness, this course cannot be considered The Path.”

“The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.”

“Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be bountiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes, while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows.”

“When the Great Dao (Tao, perfect order) prevails, the world is like a Commonwealth State shared by all, not a dictatorship.”

“That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.”

“The many are mean; only the few are noble.”

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

“The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.”

“The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.”

“The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.”

“Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment.”

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

“Virtue can only flourish among equals.”