There are in the natural order of things, therefore, two causes, Character and Thought, of their actions, and consequently of their success or failure in their lives.Aristotle on "character" and "thought". James Allen in his 1902 work As a Man Thinketh compresses these two ideas into one:"A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts"
"Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be thought a great builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego he's betrayed and given up. But everyone calls him selfish."
"A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it."
"There is no substitute for competence."
"If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others."
"We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be judged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all."
"Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
"But I don't think of you."
"There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Willmont; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read..."
Character is More Important Than Pedigree...how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or greatness. And no end happens likewise without a means...the means are as simple as wisdom could make them; that is, depending upon nature, virtue, habit, and thought... Our sensations being very much fixed to the moment, we are apt to forget that more moments are to follow the first, and consequently a man should arrange his conduct so as to suit the whole of a life.
