Professional Ethical Learning Community

1. "The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back." – Abigail Van Buren

2. Character is power. – Booker T. Washington

3. Excellence is not an act, but a habit. We are what we repeatedly do. – Aristotle

4. The secret joy in work is excellence. – Pearl S. Buck

5. You must discover what you are made for, and you must work indefatigably to achieve excellence in your field of endeavor. If you are called to be a streetsweeper, you should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

6. The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well. – William Osler

7. I challenge you to find one single solitary individual who has achieved his or her personal greatness without lots of hard work. – John Wooden

8. There is no such thing as failure. There is only giving up too soon. – Jonas Salk

9. Students live up or down to a teacher’s expectations. – Timothy Clemons

10. So much has been given to me, I have no time to ponder over that which has been denied. – Helen Keller

11. A thankful heart is the parent of all virtues. – Cicero

12. We never appreciate the value of water until the well runs dry. – Ben Franklin

13. We are not called to do great things, but to do small things with great love. – Mother Teresa

14. Love is the willingness to undergo sacrificial difficulties for the sake of another. – James Stenson

15. Humility is recognizing our own inadequacies and abilities and pressing them into service, without attracting attention or expecting the applause of others. – David Isaacs

16. The greatest fault is to be conscious of none. – Thomas Carlyle

17. Humility leads to strength, not weakness. It is the highest form of self-respect to admit mistakes and to make amends for them. – John J. McCoy

18. They that know themselves cannot be proud. – John Havel

19. Remain humble, remain simple; the more you are so, the more good you will do. – St. John Vianney

20. The most dangerous form of deception is self-deception. – Josh Billings

21. In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that things make sense regardless of how they turn out. – Valcav Havel

23. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela

24. Hope is the mother of success. – Samuel Smiles

25. Hope never abandons you; you abandon it. – George Weinberg

26. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

27. Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. – T.S. Eliot

28. Most people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be. – Abraham Lincoln

29. No one can live happily who considers only himself. You must live for others if you wish to live for yourself. – Seneca

30. A person wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle. – Ben Franklin

31. It isn’t bad luck and bad people that cause our unhappiness. It’s bad choices. – Hal Urban

32. Great learning and superior ability are of little value unless honor, truth, and integrity are added to them. – Abigail Adams

33. Do not cut your conscience to fit the year’s fashions. – Catherine Cookson

34. Character is the one test you can’t cram for. – A University President

35. Happiness is the reward of virtue. – Aristotle

36. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, have declared that our happiness as well as our dignity consists in virtue. – John Adams

37. This is no time for principals and teachers to stand timidly aside, sounding either an uncertain trumpet or no trumpet at all. The makers of music videos and porn films, the editors of teen magazines, and the rock and rap idols are sounding no uncertain trumpet in advancing their agendas…Those of us who believe that life has meaning and purpose – that honesty, simplicity, respect, and concern for others are eternal and life-enhancing values – cannot in good conscience remain silent. – F. Washington Jarvis

38. It is not the brains that matter most but that which guides them – character. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

39. Our prayers are answered not when we are given what we ask for, but when we are challenged to be what we can be. – Mortimer Adler

40. The importance of effort: A teacher opens the door, but you must enter yourself. – Chinese Proverb

41. The importance of hard work: Nothing worth having ever comes except as a result of hard work. – Booker T. Washington

42. The importance of perseverance: The triumph cannot be had without the struggle. - Wilma Rudolph

43. The importance of confidence: You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

44. The importance of courage: Courage is the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees all others. – Winston Churchill

45. The importance of attitude: Everything can be taken away from us except one thing – the freedom to choose our attitude in any set of circumstances. – Viktor Frankel

46. The importance of self-discipline: Discipline yourself, and others won’t have to. - John Wooden

47. The importance of justice: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. – The Golden Rule

48. The importance of respect: Civilization is an attitude of equal respect for all people. – Jane Addams

49. The importance of love: It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing. – Mother Teresa

50. The importance of citizenship: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke

51. The importance of truth: Truth is the only safe ground to stand on. - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

52. The importance of self-control: Be patient in one moment of anger, and you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. – Proverb

53. The importance of humility: Anyone who makes a mistake and does not admit it is making another mistake. – Confucius

54. The goal in life is the same as inn basketball: Make the effort to do the best you are capable of doing – in marriage, at your job, in the community, for your country. Make the effort to contribute in whatever way you can. You may do it materially or with time, ideas, or work. Making the effort to contribute is what counts. The effort is what counts in everything.

- John Wooden

55. Don’t measure yourself by what you’ve accomplished, but rather by what you should have accomplished with your abilities. – John Wooden

56. Technical skills and intellectual brilliance, by themselves, do not lead to a world worth living in. – Mose Durst

57. It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. – Sir Edmund Hillary

58. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind. – Dr. Seuss

59. Without a struggle, there can be no progress. – Frederick Douglass

60. Sometimes we don’t mind other peoples’ business enough. – Flannery O’Connor

61. Academic excellence itself presupposes universal ethical values: honesty, compassion, empathy, integrity, commitment, and courage. Who wants students who cheat, fail to empathically into the inner world of a book’s characters, perform their chemistry experiments perfunctorily without commitment, and slant their judgments to please their teachers? We must reveal to our students the intrinsically ethical nature of the pursuit of truth. – Douglas Heath

62. Schools require skilled, effective principals in order to outgrow their utter dependence on those principals. – Tom Donahoe

63. Most adults, including most teachers, don’t see themselves as engaged in their own moral growth. – Rick Weissbourd

64. Continuous school improvement must be assessed on the basis of results rather than intentions. – Richard Dufour & Robert Eaker

65. Character-building begins in infancy and continues until death. – Eleanor Roosevelt

66. If we’re working on the virtues themselves, we’ll have more solidarity with our students who are struggling to overcome their faults. If we don’t have a personal plan for self-improvement, we’re not going to have as much empathy for kids. – James Coughlin

67. Success and excellence are not the same. Success is outside our control; excellence is not. – Joe Paterno

68. Make yourself the kind of person you want other people to think you are. – Socrates

69. The realization that you know very little and that life is very short is the beginning of wisdom. – Sir Isaac Newton

70. Our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue to grow as long as we live. – Mortimer Adler

71. I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. – Eartha Kitt

72. The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. Successful people don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose. – E.M. Gray

73. There is no easy way to learn difficult things. – Joseph De Maistre

74. What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. – Samuel Johnson

75. If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your close friend. – Joseph Addison

76. Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry. – Mark Twain

77. We´re free to choose our attitude, regardless of circumstances. This is the most important choice we’ll ever make because it affects everything else. – Hal Urban

78. Manners are more important than laws. – Edmund Burke

79. The most important human endeavor is striving for morality. – Albert Einstein

80. For the young to become moral, they must be in the presence of people who take morality seriously. – Mary Warnock

81. Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness. – Alfred North Whitehead

82. Speak not a word by which anyone could be wounded. – Hindu Proverb

83. Happiness begins where selfishness ends. – John Wooden

84. The final forming of our character lies in our own hands. – Anne Frank

85. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said. - Mark Twain

86. What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

87. Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. – J.C. Watts

88. We never appreciate the value of water until the well runs dry. – Ben Franklin

89. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. – C.S. Lewis

90. I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. – Edward Everett Hale

91. To see what is right and not do it is cowardice. – Confucius

92. We acquire the virtues by exercising them. It is by doing just acts that we become just, be performing acts of self-control that we become temperate, and by doing courageous acts that we become courageous. – Aristotle

93. Either we rule our desires or our desires rule us. – Proverb

94. We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. – John Dryden

95. No one is free who is not master of himself. – Epictetus

96. Conscience is the root of all true courage. If we would be brave, let us obey our conscience. – James Freeman Clarke

97. The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

98. Each of us is engaged in a lifelong search for a life worth living. – F. Washington Jarvis

99. If you can’t ask the big questions, it’s like you’re building something without a foundation. – A High School Boy

100. Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? – Edward Young

101. Don’t blame poverty on God. People are poor because others do not share. – Mother Teresa

102. The more we forget ourselves – by giving ourselves to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human we are and the more we actualize ourselves. – Viktor Frankel

103. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. – Lao-Tzu

104. An ounce of character is worth a pound of intelligence. – Proverb

105. Great learning and superior ability are of little value unless honor, truth, and integrity are added to them. – Abigail Adams

106. If we would re-order the world, we must first ask, “How well are we re-ordering our souls?”– Russell Kirk

Be careful of your thoughts, For your thoughts become your words.

Be careful of your words, For your words become your deeds.

Be careful of your deeds, For your deeds become your habits.

Be careful of your habits, For your habits become your character.

Be careful of your character, For your character becomes your destiny.

– Author Unknown

Quotations are from either “Developing Student Character for Success in School and Beyond” book handout from the July 2010 ITESM – Campus Toluca conference with Tom Lickona or “Smart & Good High Schools” by Thomas Lickona & Matthew Davidson (2005).