Tags / 45 quotes from 8 sources
#character
A Beginner's Guide To Playing Interactive Fiction
Interactive fiction: half game, half book
Interactive Fiction (or IF for short) is both a computer game and a book, or rather something in between. You usually take on the role of the main character in a story. The game tells you what happens to the character, and you tell the game how the character should act. This is…
Hamlet On The Holodeck
First hypertext systems: the spot
The hypertext formats of the 1990s support many kinds of narrative writing, from voyeuristic soap operas aimed at advertising revenues to postmodernist experimental fiction for university students. The first widely successful hypertext narrative is "The Spot", a sexually…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
That character is unalterable is not, in the strict sense, true
Unalterable Character.—That character is unalterable is not, in the strict sense, true; rather is this favorite proposition valid only to the extent that during the brief life period of a man the potent new motives can not, usually, press down hard enough to obliterate the…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Il dolore che rende più profondi
Si tratta di una verità spaventosa: il dolore può renderci più profondi, può conferire un maggiore splendore ai nostri colori e una risonanza più ricca alle nostre parole. Questo avviene se non ci distrugge, se non annienta l’ottimismo e lo spirito, la capacità di avere visioni…
Il destino come eco del carattere
Ovunque l'uomo accusa la natura e il destino, ma il suo destino è in gran parte l'eco del suo carattere e le passioni, i suoi errori e le debolezze. (Democrito)
Nessuna gemma si lucida senza attrito
La gemma non può essere lucidata senza attrito, né l'uomo essere perfezionato, senza prove. (Proverbio danese)
Osx Dictionary
Neither fish nor fowl ( nor good red herring )
of indefinite character and difficult to identify or classify. ('ne carne ne pesce')
Rdf Primer
Anything with a URI reference is a resource
Because of this generality, RDF uses URIs as the basis of its mechanism for identifying the subjects, predicates, and objects in statements. To be more precise, RDF uses URI references [URIS]. A URI reference (or URIref) is a URI, together with an optional fragment identifier…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Two centuries of success literature
I was also deeply immersed in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776. I was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help. At my…
The character ethic
In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the…
Personality skills are secondary, not primary
I am not suggesting that elements of the Personality Ethic—personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking—are not beneficial, in fact sometimes essential for success. I believe they are. But these are…
Focusing on technique is like cramming
To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school.
Character communicates most eloquently
But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success…
Character without communication skills
There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary.
Principles as natural laws of human effectiveness
The Character Ethic is based on the fundamental idea that there are principles that govern human effectiveness—natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably “there” as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.
Listening requires emotional strength
I talked with the father and found that he was intellectually aware of what was happening. But while he admitted he had a temper problem, he refused to take responsibility for it and to honestly accept the fact that his emotional development level was low. It was more than his…
Deep problems need a deeper level of thinking
Albert Einstein observed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” As we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the Personality Ethic, we begin to…
Private victories precede public victories
The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others…
Character is a composite of habits
OUR CHARACTER, BASICALLY, is a composite of our habits. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes.
Dependent people cannot choose interdependence
Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent. They don’t have the character to do it; they don’t own enough of themselves. That’s why Habits 1, 2, and 3 in the following chapters deal with self-mastery. They move a person from dependence to independence.
You can't harvest before you plant
They are the “Private Victories,” the essence of character growth. Private victories precede public victories. You can’t invert that process anymore than you can harvest a crop before you plant it. It’s inside-out. As you become truly independent, you have the foundation for…
Private victory builds self-confidence
The net effect of opening the “gate of change” to the first three habits—the habits of Private Victory—will be significantly increased self-confidence.
Difficult experiences forge character
Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the…
The circle of influence is filled with be's
The Circle of Influence is filled with the be’s—I can be more patient, be wise, be loving. It’s the character focus. Anytime we think the problem is “out there,” that thought is the problem. We empower what’s out there to control us. The change paradigm is “outside-in”—what’s…
Consequences are governed by natural law
Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern. We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us. We can decide to be dishonest in our business dealings. While the social…
Finding Win/Win role models
One thing I have found particularly helpful to Win/Lose people in developing a Win/Win character is to associate with some model or mentor who really thinks Win/Win. When people are deeply scripted in Win/Lose or other philosophies and regularly associate with others who are…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
The pearl view of character
Pearl-like assumptions about the self are perhaps most stubborn when it comes to the idea of character. Almost everyone seems to believe that their personality is a consistent combination of traits which is, paradoxically, both unique and classifiable in any number of different…
Virtue ethics and good character
Inspired largely by Aristotle, virtue theorists believe that inculcating certain habits and dispositions is central to being a good person. Ethics is not so much about following rules but becoming the kind of person who behaves well.
Character judged beyond the evidence
The belief that character predicts action can be so strong that people sometimes confidently say they are certain how someone acted, even when they cannot possible know what they actually did.
Misplaced confidence in judging character
What there is plenty of evidence for is that this confidence in our ability to know the characters of others, and ourselves, is misplaced.
Situation versus character: the dime experiment
important is it in determining what we do? It is a truism to say that how we behave is a result of two factors: our own natures and the situations we find ourselves in. Many are now claiming, however, that it is situation, not character, which often makes the biggest difference…
Zimbardo: the myth of human character
‘There’s the myth about human dignity and human character,’ he told me over lunch. ‘So we really want to believe that our actions all stem from some internal set of motives, of goodness, of morality, and courage, and they get perverted in certain situations for certain people…
People typically lack character
‘situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors … In very many situations it looks as though personality is less than robustly determinative of behaviour. To put things crudely, people typically lack character.’
Character varies with situation
The central truth is not that character is a myth, but that it varies more according to situation than we tend to assume. This means that, even if we take the findings at face value, a credible notion of character remains. Consider, for instance, a person’s tendency to be…
Moral luck under the Third Reich
corollary: the same person, with the same character, if now put into a life where a different range of situations was normal, could have the following cloud: Now the overall description of the exact same person would be ‘mean’, not ‘generous’. What this shows is that there is…
Character without consistency is not character
If character doesn’t mean the tendency to display the same kind of traits across different situations, then it means nothing. Character without consistency is not character at all. There is clearly something to this, but one can still ask how much consistency character…
Traits are fairly stable across situations
Several attempts to analyse data on behaviour over a range of situations have suggested that there is significant stability of traits over different situations.7 This alone is enough to show that the idea that character is just an illusion is far too simplistic.
Passive and active character
perhaps the most important limitations of character scepticism arise from a failure to distinguish between two senses of character, what I’ll call passive and active. Passive character is the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and…
Traits are never purely active or passive
it should be clear that, in real life, traits are never purely active or passive. Rather, they tend to greater activeness the more they reflect deliberate efforts to mould our own behaviours.
A hierarchy of character traits
For the sake of simplicity, we can crudely schematise any given individual’s character into a hierarchy of types. The weakest kind of character traits are those which are passive and variable, neither self-chosen nor constant. Slightly more robust are passive, constant traits…
Few people are of consistent character
If people are indeed variable in this way, then what would that predict for the kinds of studies that Doris cites? We would expect to find that only a minority of people are actually of consistent good character, and, likewise, only a few of consistent bad character. We would…
Virtue ethics as a proposal, not a description
Virtue ethics is not a theory about how most people actually make their moral choices, but a proposal for how we should set about making ourselves able to make better moral choices. Building moral character is a challenge, so the fact that the majority don’t seem to have risen…
Consistency of character must be cultivated
This does not mean there is no value in trying to cultivate a generous personality: indeed, there may be even more. The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is…
Avoid tempting situations
Our knowledge of situationism should be used to build character more wisely, not to give up on it. For example, John Doris takes as one lesson the idea that we should avoid tempting situations rather than rely on character to enable us to resist temptation. The father of virtue…
The habits practised inside the building
But for Akong, these aren’t the most important things at all. What really matters are the habits that are practised inside the building, and which give the space a strange kind of character that persists even once the walls have come tumbling down.