Character
George was an excellent and industrious ruler, self-sacrificing, high-minded, and unwearying in the furtherance of the highest interests of his land and people. As a man he was upright, vigorous and energetic, if somewhat irascible. A far-seeing and faithful adherent of the emperor and empire, he accomplished much for his domain by economy, love of order and wise direction of activities of his state officials. The grief of his life was Luther's Reformation and what he regarded to be apostasy from the Old Faith. Of a strictly religious, although not narrow, disposition, he sought at any cost to keep his subjects from falling away from the Church, but his methods of attaining his object were not always free from reproach.
Read more about this topic: George, Duke Of Saxony
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“No real “vital” character in fiction is altogether a conscious construction of the author. On the contrary, it may be a sort of parasitic growth upon the author’s personality, developing by internal necessity as much as by external addition.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,—which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)