Character Strengths and Virtues Quotes

“Humble individuals will not willfully distort information in order to defend, repair, or verify their own image. For humble people, there should be no press toward self-importance and no burning need to see—or present—themselves as being better than they actually are. They should also not be particularly interested in dominating others in order to receive entitlements or to elevate their own status. On the other hand, humility should not lead people to take harsh or condemning approaches toward themselves, magnifying weaknesses and severely punishing failures while overlooking strengths and successes.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“In short, if one is entitled to everything, then one is thankful for nothing.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Appreciation of beauty is a strength that connects someone directly to excellence. Gratitude connects someone directly to goodness.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... gratefulness is an attitude that underlies successful functioning over the life course.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Smith observed that society can function purely on utilitarian grounds or on the basis of gratitude, but he clearly believed that societies of gratitude were more attractive in large part because they provide an important emotional resource for promoting social stability.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“An aha experienced decades ago by one of us is relevant to this point. Halfway through a grueling clinical internship, CP [Christopher Peterson] complained to his supervisor, “No one [meaning the patients] ever says thank you for anything I try to do.” The response from the experienced psychiatrist stopped CP mid-whine: “If they [the patients] could say thank you, how many of them do you think would be in a psychiatric hospital?”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Attention is crucial to the success of self-regulation, and indeed attentional processes often constitute the first step toward either success or failure at self-regulation. As mentioned, reduced self-monitoring is often a precipitating factor in self-regulation failure because it is quite easy to lose track of one’s status or quit regulating oneself when one cannot evaluate the distance between the current state and the goal state ... When people cease to attend to their own behavior, self-regulation typically deteriorates.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Humility, rather than involving the presence of certain thoughts or behaviors, might better be construed as the absence of narcissism, self-enhancement, or defensiveness.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Indeed, lack of self-control may be at the root of all emotional disorders, so named because the person is controlled by anxiety and depression rather than vice versa. Everyone experiences negative emotions; what determines whether they escalate to full-blown disorders may simply be whether the person has the ability to circumscribe them.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“We are reminded of the comment by Linus in the comic strip Peanuts: “I love humanity—it’s people I can’t stand.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Teamwork is a dance—engrossing to perform and exciting to watch.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“We are grateful to people who occasionally help out, but we elevate them to a higher moral plane when they consistently do so, when we can count on them to show up rain or shine, not just when the boss is looking or free coffee is being served ... Along these lines, we value people who are loyal to their groups, who do not jump ship at the first rough weather.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... intelligence is a combination of mental ability and the accumulated knowledge that arises from that ability.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Although acting inconsistently with one’s own implicit interests and developmental trends can sometimes pay off, the data suggest that those who ignore their deeper impulses, curiosities, and values typically experience sub-optimal outcomes. For example, the latter types tend not to be the ones who make a mark on history.”
― Christopher Peterson , Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Jaynes (1976) suggested that task persistence is a uniquely human strength. With some exceptions, most animals do not persist at any given task longer than 20 minutes before moving on to the next task.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Youth development is an interdisciplinary field that draws broadly on different social sciences to understand children and adolescents (Larson, 2000). It embraces an explicit developmental stance: Children and adolescents are not miniature adults, and they need to be understood on their own terms. Youth development also emphasizes the multiple contexts in which development occurs. Particularly influential as an organizing framework has been Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979, 1986) ecological approach, which articulates different contexts in terms of their immediacy to the behaving individual. So, the microsystem refers to ecologies with which the individual directly interacts: family, peers, school, and neighborhood. The mesosystem is Bronfenbrenner’s term for relationships between and among various microsystems. The exosystem is made up of larger ecologies that indirectly affect development and behavior, like the legal system, the social welfare system, and mass media. Finally, the macrosystem consists of broad ideological and institutional patterns that collectively define a culture. There is the risk of losing the individual amid all these systems, but the developmental perspective reminds us that different children are not interchangeable puppets. Each young person brings his or her own characteristics to life, and these interact with the different ecologies to produce behavior. Youth development”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“If parents can instill self-control in their children, they can achieve a powerful and important effect that will benefit their offspring for years to come. Indulgent parenting and an excessive concern with maximizing children’s self-esteem may, however, be detrimental to self-control, producing instead a personality that is weak, narcissistic, and self-indulgent.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Just as a muscle grows tired from exertion, the capacity for self-regulation becomes depleted after it is used. Also like a muscle, the capacity for self-regulation appears to grow stronger through regular exercise (after it recovers from the initial fatigue).”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Among a number of interesting findings, this work reveals that young people differ widely among themselves in whether they define drug use as primarily a moral or a prudential issue, with further variations according to age and drug type. Defining drug use as a prudential issue is not in itself associated with less use, because use is relatively strong among those who think of it in terms of personal autonomy. Drug use is typically less prevalent among those who think of it as a moral issue—as young people tend to do for harder drugs—and among those who consider it prudential and are concerned about its future personal consequences, the truly prudent.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Forgiveness is associated with a variety of traits that are of value for personal and societal well-being. Forgiving people appear to be slightly lower in a variety of negative affects, including anger, anxiety, depression, and hostility. Forgivers also tend to endorse socially desirable attitudes and behavior, and self-ratings of the disposition to forgive correlate negatively with clinicians’ ratings of hostility and passive-aggressive behavior.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“McCullough and colleagues have worked with a more circumscribed definition of forgiveness. They have defined forgiveness as motivational changes whereby a person becomes less motivated toward revenge and avoidance of a transgressor, and simultaneously more benevolent toward the transgressor.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... Enright’s developmental theorizing emphasizes that reasoning about the use of forgiveness appears to mature as people age, with the lowest levels of maturity reflecting the idea that forgiveness is appropriate only after revenge has been obtained or after restitution has been made. As people’s moral reasoning develops, their reasoning about forgiveness becomes oriented toward viewing forgiveness as an unconditional gift given to transgressors based on the belief in the innate value of all persons.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Self-regulation is highly valued. Even if we find them a bit tedious, we admire people who stick to an exercise regimen. We certainly value people who do not express every negative emotion they experience, those who are “low maintenance” because they can control their reactions to disappointment and insecurity. We can count on the self-controlled person to keep her promises because she will not be distracted in the course of so doing.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“To be humble and modest does not entail self-derogation or self-humiliation.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“This character strength is a quiet one. Those who are modest let their accomplishments speak for themselves. They do not seek the spotlight. They do not toot their own horns. They acknowledge mistakes and imperfections. They do not take undue credit for their accomplishments, instead regarding themselves as fortunate to be in a position where something good has happened to them.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Forgiveness and mercy are fulfilling for the individual, although not necessarily fun. Indeed, it is precisely when forgiveness is difficult and produces no immediate hedonic payoff that it is most fulfilling in the sense of allowing individuals to know they have done the right thing. Revenge can be very sweet, and grudges can have considerable staying power, but these are negative actions that often satisfy only deficiency motives—even when sated, they leave us empty. Turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, giving people a second chance, starting over—these satisfy us even if they effect no permanent change in the world in which we live. One need not be cynical to observe that forgiveness and mercy do not always prevent future transgressions against us. That is why a general trait needs to exist to handle the repeat business.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“We classify the positive traits that protect us from excess as strengths of temperance. What are the types of excess of special concern? Hatred—against which forgiveness and mercy protect us. Arrogance—against which humility and modesty protect us. Short-term pleasure with long-term costs—against which prudence protects us. And destabilizing emotional extremes of all sorts—against which self-regulation protects us.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“D. V. Day and Lord (1988) reviewed a number of executive succession studies to assess the effects of new leaders on organizational effectiveness. They reported that the ascent of a new leader explained between 5.6% and 24.2% of the variance in organizational performance indices across multiple studies. N. Weiner and Mahoney (1981) examined such succession effects in 193 companies across a 19-year time span. They found that leadership accounted for 44% to 47% of the variance in organizational performance indices.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“The LBDQ-VII is one of the earliest and most widely used instruments of leadership behavior. It emerged from the Ohio State leadership research teams and evolved to its present form to cover 12 aspects of leadership behavior. These were representation, demand reconciliation, tolerance of uncertainty, persuasiveness, initiating structure, tolerance of freedom, role assumption, consideration, production emphasis, predictive accuracy, integration, and superior orientation.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Leadership reflects an orientation to promote, direct, and manage social action. This orientation is grounded in a need for dominance and constructive power. The effective engagement of leadership processes follows from high self-confidence and from significant cognitive and social capabilities.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification