WIST

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.

Cavett Robert (1908-1997) American orator, lawyer
“A Ticket to Anywhere,” speech (1969)

Variants:

• "Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the mood in which it was made has left you."
• "Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the emotion of the moment has passed."

Described in California Farmer, Volume 230 (1969)

The Bible is not a Rulebook for Other People. Those who pretend that it is are always, always trying to tell you who it is that you don’t have to love. When that’s your starting point, you’re reading it wrong.

Fred Clark (Contemp.) American author, journalist
Slacktivist blog, “The Bible Is Not a Rulebook for Other People” (9 Apr 2012)
Full text.

No Nation has a monopoly on good things. Each one has something that the others could well afford to adopt.

Will Rogers (1879-1935) American humorist
Weekly column (30 Nov 1930)

Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this “I” to live — this poor “I” that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) Spanish philosopher and writer [Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo]
The Tragic Sense of Life [Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida], ch. 3 “The Hunger of Immortality” (1913) [tr. Flitch (1921)]
Full text.

But however close we sometimes seem to that dark and final abyss, let no man of peace and freedom despair. For he does not stand alone.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)
Speech, UN General Assembly (25 Sep 1961)