February 14

“We alter day by day:
Each little moment as life’s current rolls,
Stamps some faint impress on our yielding souls;
We may not rest or stay,
Drifting on tides unseen to one dread goal and sure.”

LEWIS MORRIS

“Probably there is no such thing as an indifferent moment – a moment in which our characters are not being secretly shaped by the bias of our will, either for good or evil.”

GOULBURN

“By repeated choices we form our character.”

February 12

“Living as those who have a charge from Christ will be to us a constant safeguard. Sorrow, instead of embittering our hearts, will open in them deeper and sweeter fountains; success will make them watchful; Failure, humble; nay, the commonest things will be ministers of good; in them there will be a discipline for our tempers; and from their use we shall obtain the power of applying high principles to little things.”

Bishop WILBERFORCE

“It is our chief difficulty about the formation of Christian character, that we do not give enough time to it. We do not make it sufficiently one continual work through our whole life. . . . We never outgrow the need of watchfulness till we come to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

“Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.”

GEORGE ELIOT

February 11

“Some men are content not to do mean actions. I want to become incapable of a mean thought or feeling.”

G. MACDONALD

“No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.”

G. MACDONALD

“To give unbridled bent to impulse, spiritual or physical, is to lose, or lower, or destroy the tone of character.”

KNOX LITTLE

“The gentleness of perfect freedom can only be won by the discipline of self-restraint.”

BARRETT

February 10

“Hardness of character is a want of minute attention to the feelings of others. It does not proceed from malignity or a carelessness of inflicting pain, but from a want of delicate perception of those little things by which pleasure is conferred or pain excited.”

SIDNEY SMITH

“His gentleness was inconceivable to those who had not seen it. One might almost say that he was meekness itself rather than a man gifted with that grace, and this gave him such ascendancy over other men that everyone yielded to him, while he, on his part, sought to give up everything to others, desiring nothing, save to see them serving God and saving their souls.”

From The Life of St. Francis de Sales

“However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness.”

From Ethics of George Eliot

February 9

“Nobleness of character is nothing but steady love of good, and steady scorn of evil.”

FROUDE

“The foundation of every noble character is absolute sincerity.”

“What is character? Character is that actual, mental, moral, spiritual condition reached at any given moment through the influence of all the many impulses, external and internal, of life; character, that is, the set or bent of the soul; the resultant in the individual personal being, of all the converging forces which it exerts or to which it submits. . . . Try to live in view of the truth that each act is contributing to that final fixed result.”