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When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.
Put trust in character.
-Greek Proverb
Difficult times are meant to test one's character and perhaps even faith.
"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters."
To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or principle.
"Character is much eaiser kept than recovered".
As Kierkegaard insisted from his theistic perspective, so Nietzsche also argues from his naturalistic one: whoever accepts the whole must accept as well the negative, resented, embittering, contrary elements in that whole. If life and character and nature and society truly are wholes, then everything in them is in some way essential to that whole; and we cannot grasp that whole by means of value-judgments if values are INHERENTLY DISCRIMINATORY or divisive functions of our intelligence. Values drive rifts between options, they exist for the sake of the natural powers of the will which (so to speak) needs its food cut up into willable portions or differentiated options.
The worldview of modern scientism and capitalism are profoundly wrongheaded, rooted in an artificialism and arbitrarialism that cannot begin to see the primordial truth of the way nature actually works, in animals and in ourselves as well. All modern culture and ideology that try to disestablish these principles -- radical egalitarianism, capitalist or bourgeois materialist-artificialist hierarchicalism, arbitrarial libertarianism, etc. -- are flying in the face of the headwinds of both nature and values, the tides of human nature and human character. But these ideologies' fallacies are incomprehensible to them just because their culture systematically prohibits them from thinking about issues at the level of structural principles, of ultimate preconceptions: nothing but good pedestrian mechanical bourgeois logic, as remote as it can possibly be from philosophy.
Someone who has reduced his mind and life and soul and personality to meager or minor things -- someone marked by "mikropsychia" or in Latin "pusillanimitas" -- has a petty-souled outlook on life that no one but him ingrained in him. It is not great wealth or great power that makes a man "great," but "makropsychia" or "magnanimitas," great-souledness, a distinctively aristic virtue, a primal determination to rupture the finite and reductivist structures that habits and mechanical intellect tend to erect in our lives. The lust of most people to live in a trivialized and finitized or ordinarized world is patent; it is a way of achieving security, making oneself safe from threats, challenges, criticisms. And the lust of aristoi to live in a world of greatness, of monumental issues and questions that are made of the kind of bronze that will endure for ages to come, that is also patent: it is a way for capacious souls to furnish their minds with just the right scale or magnitude of challenges, of intellectual and moral instruments with the right heft for their wills to wield.
Nietzsche is a determinist like Spinoza, a fatalist like the Greeks: character is fate, we only become what we already are (Aristotle's more genteel expression: no one achieves arete IN SPITE OF his base of natural potential, only because of it). Aristic moral "fiber" must exist first of all as an instinctive imperative, and second as an imperative of character, before it can be cultivated by an appropriate directorial culture. The resources that make human beings ultimately philosophical or spiritual (Aristotelian eudaimonia) are so profound and structural that of course they cannot be "learned"; if one has them, they can be developed and cultured, but that is not the same thing as "acquiring" them.
Nothing in the matter-of-fact or finite order of experience is directly or obviously grounded in actual authoritative principles; phenomena do not permit us to see through them to their infinite preconditions, and certainly not even to comprehend or conceptualize what kinds of things those preconditions may be. It is only through holistic and variably stressed principles that we can see the formation or architectonics of finite realities, in accordance with those lawful and ordering forces. There is no empirical path to principles, no psychological route to values or ultimate duties or essential character: hundreds of millions of human beings may despair of not having "salvation" who do not and cannot ever comprehend what the issue even is, i.e. the onslaught of the finite order that threatens to make our ambiguously finite/infinite spirit into just another finite particle within the finite world. We have to be always carrying out our self-education dialectically, with one eye on each domain, the finite and the infinite, each of which demands its own peculiar modus of intelligence and insight from us.
Only once one has understood the aristic ethos will one comprehend that there are many ways of mistreating or abusing another person that one cannot permit oneself, not merely because the other has rights (in his limited status, and specific to that status) and long-term needs to be properly taken care of, but also because oneself is an aristos and absolutely has to be above all such intemperate and myopic behavior. We are talking about something incomprehensible to most moderns, an ethics of character: an autonomous ethics, enforced out of one's sense of shame and guilt at not being true to oneself--not a heteronomous banausic or slavish sense of shame in the eyes of others' opinions about oneself. To have higher expectations of oneself is the decisive thing.
No one can look either our planet or our societies in the face and imagine humans are in any respect as rational as they have been mass-bamboozled into believing that they are. All the abstractions in terms of which we "think" about ourselves are free-floating and autonomous conformisms and orthodoxies, irrationalist self-complacencies and self-flattery that manifest the disconnectivity and dissociativity typifying banauseia; we will continue past the several points-of-no-return imagining in abstracto that, of course, we must necessarily possess the faculties to reverse any mistaken policies and cure any destruction. But the problem does not lie ultimately anywhere outside our own intrinsic and self-biased idiotia, our primordial and primally blind characters. To have a character blithely oblivious to the nature and concept of one's character is the doom of the vast majority of "mankind."
what molds a persons specific character is most often determined by what the person initially consents to take in and give out
We believe profoundly in silence—the sign of a perfect equilibrium.
Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit.
Those who can preserve their selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the
storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; not a
ripple upon the shining pool—those, in the mind of the person of
nature, possess the ideal attitude and conduct of life.
If you ask us, `What is silence?' we will answer, `It is the
Great Mystery. The holy silence is God's voice.'
If you ask, `What are the fruits of silence?' we will
answer, `They are self-control, true courage of endurance, patience,
dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.'
Unfortunately for me, intentions don't build character; action does.
--Me.
Greek culture understands the key to understanding nature, instinct and organism as consisting in the endowment of each creature with some distinctive "excellence" or talent (arete). Among humans there is great controversy whether (because of the diversity among different character-types and the clash of different political and philosophical perspectives) there is at all such a unitary, universal or congruent thing as "excellence" for man per se. There are many aspectival or specialized excellences; but does man in general have a defining purpose or a metaphysically obligatory excellence that everyone, just insofar as he is human, is obligated to cultivate and pursue? --Or do we have a problem here in trying to extend the term "human" to creatures who really have little substantial in common with one another?
(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.
The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.
I think we've been choosing boards of directors and many wrong leaders for the wrong reason. We choose people for their image, their charisma, their style and we should be choosing them for their integrity, for their character, and their substance.
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through
experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened,
ambition inspired, and success achieved."
Character is like a tree and reputation is like a shadow, the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
"Man needs now no more degrees, but character,
No more study, but wisdom."
Be.
Virtuous.
Full of character.
Present at all times.
Visible, to those who know.
Whole, Living in Spirit, Loving, and In Service.
Friendships based only in expansion and deepening of Spirit.
For Love that has any other purpose ends, absent of anything real.
~Danielle Marie Crume
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously “present,” an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.
Character is who you are when no one is watching.
"Their gunnin' for me, want to see me fall, you know my story, been through it all, times I felt like dyin', but I ain't cryin', what didn't kill me, makes me strong as iron."
Eudaimonia is natural fatalism, the self-destiny of character--daimones being traditionally the lowest-order divinities, steering us to our unknown ends. Sometimes disaster befalls us because we veer from our own intrinsic good sense; sometimes it occurs because we have followed our own intrinsic good sense but this is rooted in an ultimately or obscurely dysdaimonic character. Tragedy is not always the result of a "mistake"; or sometimes the mistake lies in what we are, not what we do. Unlike mere misfortune or chance, tragedy is rooted in primal actions and preconceptions of our character. Petty-souled individuals (micropsychia) are unlikely to bring tragedy on themselves; in a way, they already are tragic beings normally and all of the time. Only ambitious and self-driving individuals of great soul (megalopsychia) bring on themselves the risk of tragedy in its truest form, a radical overstepping of bounds.
The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
