Julian Barnes Quotes

Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles.

You cannot build up a character in a solitude; you need a formed character to stand a solitude.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

Character is the colossal hope of human improvement within and without.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Before you can do something you must first be something.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Praise makes good men better and bad men worse.

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

Flaws are really interesting.

Who you are becoming is more important than what you are accumulating.

I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

Character teaches above our wills.

The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

In the end, it is the person you become, not the things you have achieved, that is the most important.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

In order for good to blossom it must be cultivated and exercised by constant practice, and to be truly righteous there is required a daily pruning of the evil growth of our characters by a daily repen- tance from sin.

The within is ceaselessly becoming the without. From the state of a man's heart doth proceed the conditions of his life; his thoughts blossom into deeds, and his deeds bear the fruitage of character and destiny.

We have real difficulty here because everyone thinks of changing the world, but where, oh where, are those who think of changing themselves? People may genuinely want to be good, but seldom are they prepared to do what it takes to produce the inward life of goodness that can form the soul. Personal formation into the likeness of Christ is arduous and lifelong.

I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to myself with time, not only in terms of my career choices, but the choices I make within one role or performance. I used to compose characters that were farther from me, but I find now that I like to craft a subtle composition, a subtle change in your essence.

The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.

Like an actor who transforms into the character that they're playing, you can transform into yourself.