Character Strengths and Virtues Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Teamwork is a dance—engrossing to perform and exciting to watch.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“... gratefulness is an attitude that underlies successful functioning over the life course.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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