It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.

Character is destiny.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

I love Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove – there is so much life and vitality around Portobello and Ladbroke Grove. It has come up a lot since I started Virgin more than 40 years ago, but there is so much character.

A man’s own manner and character is what most becomes him.

It’s really fun to put yourself into a character – into shoes you wouldn’t normally be in.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th‘ observer’s sake.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

Places I’ve lived since then had to have some kind of uniqueness and character about them. And logically Key West, and then Down Island. So, all of that stuff sort of had it’s roots in New Orleans and went crazy.

Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

People are underestimating the force of angry kids.

I do have tatoos, and I do wear leather, but there are other sides of me, that my film express.