Does Character Matter

What is the true essence of a human being? What's left when you take away the makeup and the clothes and the labels and the societal standards? What remains when you take away the mask? All that's left is the deep grit of the soul inside us all; all that's left is character. So what exactly is character? According to dictionary.com, character is defined as "an account of the qualities or peculiarities of a person or thing; mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual." Once we understand what character is, we must ask ourselves yet another question. Why does character matter? There are many attributes of character, but there are ten that most people are familiar with: citizenship, compassion, courage, gratitude, honesty, perseverance,
Thus, we stumble upon the one of many ways in which character matters. Character is a struggle, and the battles life forces us to fight make us strong. Henry Ford once said that "Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves we endure help us in our marching onward." The building of character is the hard part; the places we can go and the things we can accomplish once we've built it are easy feats in comparison. When life gets hard, character is what refuses to let our feet stop carrying us down the path that is in
Character matters because it's the good each of us does in the lives of those around us. Unlike many things that seem to be important in modern society- beauty, status, wealth, and the like- character isn't a mask for us to hide behind; in fact, it's quite the opposite. Character is what you have when you take away every imaginable mask. If humanity was to be stripped of everything that matters outwardly, all that would be left is character. Character is the bare