Source identified
“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
The narrator presents character and action as reciprocal: choices express who a person is, while repeated actions also reshape the person who makes them.
Source note: Adam Bede; narrator’s reflection during the novel’s moral development, represented from Project Gutenberg #507.
Source identified
“To have faults and not to reform them,—this, indeed, should be pronounced having faults.”
Making an error is less serious than refusing to correct it after the problem has become visible.
Source note: The Analects of Confucius, James Legge’s public-domain English translation; Book XV distinguishes ordinary faults from the refusal to reform them.
Source identified
“The education of character is very much a question of models.”
People absorb conduct from examples around them, so lived models can teach more powerfully than rules that are contradicted by behavior.
Source note: Self-Help, Chapter XII, “Example—Models,” Project Gutenberg #935. Smiles argues that character education depends heavily on models because people unconsciously mould themselves after the characters, manners, habits and opinions around them.
Source identified
“Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”
Circumstances can expose habits of thought and character that were already present, turning difficulty into information about what needs attention or change.
Source note: As a Man Thinketh; Allen uses circumstance as a mirror for character and habitual thought.
Source identified
“It is reflection which forms habits, and fixes principles indelibly on the heart.”
Habit formation becomes stronger when action is joined with reflection, because principles understood and revisited are more likely to guide later choices.
Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Wollstonecraft connects reflection with the formation of durable principles and habits.
Source identified
“The years teach much which the days never know.”
Some lessons only become visible across long stretches of experience and cannot be forced into a single day of reflection.
Source note: Essay “Experience,” Essays: Second Series.