The From the Cradle statistics system has five attributes, each reflecting some basic characteristic of your character's physical and mental abilities. They are meant to be broad, encompassing most any situation where anybody would have to do anything, while skills are more specific abilities. The average value of all attributes is Fair: some species have a lower default value for some attributes and a higher default value for others, but they will average out to Fair. The five attributes are:

Agility: affects how quickly and nimbly you can move. High agility is useful for getting out of the way of somebody trying to shoot at you, or opening a locked door with lockpicks, or grasping something that seems to be just out of reach, among other things.
Charisma: affects how good you are at getting people to do things that they may not ordinarily want to do. For instance, getting them to not shoot at you at all, or open the door for you, or lean up and grab whatever it is that's just out of reach.
Constitution: affects how hardy your character is and how long they can stand physical or mental punishment. Enduring a gunshot wound, surviving poison without the antidote hidden behind a locked door, or being hit on the head by a falling object without ill effect are all examples of constitution.
Intelligence: affects how smart your character is; both "book smarts" and "street smarts". Knowing that the low refire rate of your adversary's firearm will let you get two shots off while he recovers from his first, knowing how to simply disassemble the locked door from the outside, or improvising a simple machine to get an object into reach are all factors of intelligence.
Strength: affects your character's raw physical power. Good uses of strength include responding to someone's trying to shoot you by throwing a heavy box at them, or smashing a door down with simple brute force, or shaking the platform an object is on until it falls off.