My English teacher gave us an assignment a couple weeks ago to write a five paragraph essay on "character." I wrote mine and finished all of the touch-ups yesterday and would really like to share it with you! Let me know how you like or dislike it, please! I'd really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” These statements are ironic in more than one way, the first due to society’s generally and popularly perceived thoughts on the word. A character can be one in a story, while a person can also act as a character in that story. A character may be a letter of the alphabet or a symbol used daily on the keyboard before computer-using businessmen. Based on the definition in quotations above, this is not that type of character. Secondly, these statements are ironic considering who spoke them. Helen Keller was a blind and deaf woman who lived long ago, and Helen Keller lived the entirety of her life in quiet but certainly not in ease. Keller experienced trials and sufferings, and her ending was good character and a life-changing history that became known to all. One may ask the question still: What is character? Webster Dictionary defines the word described by Ms. Keller as: “one of the attributes or features that make up and distinguish an individual; the complex of mental and ethical traits marking and often individualizing a person, group, or nation.” In the viewing of Keller’s powerful remark, one can see that the soul can be strengthened through suffering, producing “good” character; ambition is inspired within a person enduring trials, leaving “good” character; success is achieved because of pain and difficulty, giving birth to “good” character. Character is more than a tear-jerking novel’s hero and character is no longer a number, letter, or sign.
The nourishment of a person’s spirit yields better character. An elderly woman and retired writer by the name of Alyce Faulkner states this: “Character is a result of knowing God and His working in our lives. There are many ‘nice and good’ people- people who have never done things that I have done, and from a humanistic point of view, have and display ‘good’ character.” Faulkner goes on to say that true character lies in the faith in a man called Jesus and the display of the apostle Paul’s “fruits of the Spirit.” These “fruits” are found in a lifestyle filled with love, patience, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Abstaining from the desire to give in to the temptation of selfishness makes endurance. Abstinence from selfishness allows a sense of tragedy to creep into the lives of all human beings because all human beings have the grand desire to grant oneself with pleasure. The strengthening of one’s soul is a result of the endurance of tragedy, and the strengthening of one’s soul leads to character. A man with character shows love to those around him, a man with character is patient. A man of character brings peace, has kindness, gives goodness, and practices faithfulness. A man with character exemplifies himself as a gentle man, and a man with character aims to be self-controlled.
Ambition is determination, desire, and motivation combined. Ambition allows the faintest of dreams and the quaintest of dreams to thrive and transform into reality. When an individual allows ambition to become a part of who they are and what they do, that person invites in prospection and excellent, promising chances to succeed. Without it one’s character may waver. Success is not always a consequence of solidity and ambition, but as one may have seen that endurance produces character, he may also see that ambition without achievement adds to that endurance, therefore resulting in right character. A man by the name of Thomas Edison created the incandescent light bulb in the year of 1880 after hundreds of attempts at it. At the beginning of his many tries, he remarked, “We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.” At the end of his hundreds of failures, Edison responded with weighing words: “If I find 10, 000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Many who knew Thomas Edison knew that he was, indeed, a man of character, and his work and words proved it. After observing Helen Keller’s description, one may see that this distinctive attribute is strictly necessary in “good” character’s classification, and ambition is a byproduct of real character.
Ambition often leads to success, but true success must be honest. A man with character is a man with integrity, and that sort of man will truly succeed in whatever he does. The wife of a Baptist pastor and a second grade teacher by the name of Michelle Ray testifies to what she believes to be genuine character. She states that a person with character lives their life away from people to match their life in the midst of them. Her husband, she declares, lives his life in such a way. “I know a lot of marriages plagued with fear and insecurity. I have never had one day of fear or insecurity in marriage. I rest in God and in my husband’s integrity.” This man’s actions are a promising covenant to Mrs. Ray and an inspiration to others watching him.
Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, and Pastor Ray are each examples of steady work and endurance; they are examples of the inspiration of ambition leading to success achieved. These things are things of character, and each man must strive toward goodness in order to be trusted and in order to be a man of “good,” upright, and unwavering character.
