Character Strengths and Virtues Quotes

“Models of leader attributes that dominated in the early part of the 20th century emphasized leader traits. Several surveys and reviews of this literature identified a number of dispositional qualities that distinguished leaders from nonleaders, including intelligence, originality, dependability, initiative, desire to excel, sociability, adaptability, extroversion, and dominance. However, no single personal quality was strongly and consistently correlated with leadership.”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“The leader exists to help others in an unbiased and unassuming way, nourishing any and all followers (“The wise leader is like water”).”
― christopher peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Parenting is important in the development of a child’s moral reasoning. Most specifically, parental stage of justice reasoning, the use of induction, democratic family decision-making processes, and authoritative parenting style are related to higher stages of children’s justice reasoning development.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“In addition, the care perspective legitimates emotional responsiveness, in the form of empathy or being moved by the plight of another, as a source of knowledge and appropriate motivation. The strong emotional sense that one must prevent harm or right an interpersonal or social injustice is seen as a moral voice as undeniable as our justice-based codes and laws regarding moral conduct.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Higher stage [regarding moral reasoning] parents do not use love withdrawal as a parenting technique and prefer discussion-based parenting (e.g., induction). Higher stage parents are less likely to endorse “conventional” values (e.g., obedience, manners, respect for rules and law) and are more likely to endorse values that promote autonomy and commitment to and respect for others.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“For both justice and care, perspective taking is a source of knowledge about others and about the possible consequences of one’s own actions as they have impact on the lives of others. Developing this ability, in either its strictly cognitive form or its cognitive and affective mix, constitutes an epistemological advantage. That is to say, it deepens and broadens one’s knowledge and the forms of one’s knowledge regarding moral contexts, deliberation, action, and likely consequences.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Being able to conceive moral contexts from multiple sides and being able to more deeply understand each person involved are major achievements in moral development.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“In contrast to the objectivity of blind justice and the abstract logic of principled reasoning, care reasoning requires understanding particularity—the needs, interests, and well-being of another person—and understanding the relationship between oneself and that other person. This requires a moral stance “informed by care, love, empathy, compassion, and emotional sensitivity.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Balanced and restorative justice is a new approach to juvenile crime that conceives of crime as an act that not only harms people but also violates relationships in a community. Thus, rather than a retributive approach, in which the state punishes an offender, restorative justice practices emphasize healing of the victim, the offender, and the community.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Generativity is considered normative in the middle and late adult years—so much so that people are considered “off time” or at odds with the “social clock” if, by their 40s, they are not assuming such responsibility through family or work. Generativity is not limited to family or kin. Nor does generativity seek necessarily to maintain the status quo ... Engaging in community volunteer work, especially for religious causes, confers particular benefits on the elderly. Panel data reveal that such community involvement lowers levels of depression in the elderly.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“However, research with activists in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and of those who sheltered Holocaust survivors during World War II confirm that compassion, empathy, and social responsibility were core family values that motivated their actions. Once exercised in action, values of social responsibility and service to others may become integral to identity.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“It does appear that involvement in organizations with a diverse membership and in groups that engage in acts of charity or community service boosts social trust.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Respondents who say that they want to find purpose and meaning in life also rate public-interest goals high in importance. Self-interest and materialist goals are unrelated to public-interest goals or to the desire to find purpose and meaning in life.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Starrett (1996) argued that, because we inhabit a global community, our civic responsibilities transcend the borders of nation-states.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Clusters of items in the scale point to the following tendencies associated with social responsibility: greater concern for social and moral issues; disapproval of privilege and favor; emphasis on duties and self-discipline; greater conventionality; less rebelliousness; greater sense of trust and confidence in the world; greater poise, assurance, and personal security.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“The ties that bind younger generations to the broader community are reciprocal, that is, when young people feel that the community cares about them and that they have a say in community affairs, they are more likely to identify with the community’s goals and to want to commit to its service. The evidence from prevention and community youth development studies is clear: When youths feel connected to others in the institutions of their communities, they are less likely to violate the norms and more likely to serve the common good of those communities.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Likewise, as William James maintained, the virtues of a good citizen—a sense of duty and responsibility to the common good—are the “rock upon which states are built”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Everybody should give some of their time for the good of their town or country.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“I have a responsibility to improve the world in which I live.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Fairness is not decomposable into other classified strengths, although such characteristics as kindness may lay its foundation and such characteristics as self-regulation may facilitate its implementation.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Knee-jerk disobedience and anticonformity are no more praiseworthy than the most mindless loyalty to a group.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“It is conceivable that the psychological and physical benefits of volunteering eventuate in longer life. Two recent studies found that among community-dwelling older adults, volunteering led to reduced risk of early death.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“In sum, secure attachment at all ages depends on the sensitivity of attachment figures. The results of intervention studies with infants, parents, and couples provide compelling evidence that sensitivity is a skill that can be taught and learned, and that can transform troubled relationships into well-functioning, satisfying ones.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“When the infants were between 6 and 9 months of age, caregivers in the experimental group were trained in sensitive responding. Then at 1 year of age, Strange Situation assessments were done. The effects of the intervention were dramatic. Compared with the control group, infants in the experimental group were almost three times as likely to show a secure pattern of attachment. Follow-up studies found that the effects of the intervention were enduring and were still evident more than 2 years later not only in child–caregiver relationships but also in child–peer interactions.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... love is marked by the sharing of aid, comfort, and acceptance. It involves strong positive feelings, commitment, and even sacrifice.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Ryan and Frederick (1997) showed that in a population suffering from debilitating pain, pain level per se did not detract from vitality. Instead, pain fright was negatively associated with vitality, as was attending treatment for external as opposed to internal reasons. Some of the factors that may influence one’s sense of vitality and contribute to its resilience are one’s feelings of personal causation, optimism, and perceptions of social support.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Thayer (1986), for example, has shown numerous times that moderate exercise—such as a brisk 10-minute walk—tends to increase subjective energy and, to a lesser extent, decrease tension for up to 2 hours after the exercise has been completed. Eating a small sugar snack, on the other hand, is associated with significantly higher tension just 30 minutes after the snack has been eaten. And although energy increases and tiredness decreases initially after the snack, both then reverse directions later so that by 2 hours after the snack, energy has decreased and tiredness increased beyond what they were to begin with”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“... Nix et al. (1999) showed in experimental studies that whereas task success can produce happiness, only success at autonomously motivated tasks maintained or enhanced vitality. Finally, in new research, Bernstein and Ryan (2001) argued that subjective vitality can be affected by contact with nature.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“From C. R. Rogers’s (1961) perspective, the problems of inauthenticity arise not because a person hides his real emotional reactions from others (as may sometimes be appropriate) but because he hides them from himself.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Tice and Baumeister (1997) found that procrastinators not only received lower grades but also got sick more and had more visits to health clinics than nonprocrastinators.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification