Men Quotes

Maybe I was just born to argue with men.

Animals, we have been told, are taught by their organs. Yes, I would add, and so are men, but men have this further advantage that they can also teach their organs in return.

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.

One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man.

God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.

The little man is still a man.

A man does not mind being blamed for his faults, and being punished for them, and he patiently suffers much for them; but he becomes impatient if he is required to give them up.

One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.

Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.

Man's restlessness makes him strive.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Nobody, they say, is a hero to his valet. Of course; for a man must be a hero to understand a hero. The valet, I dare say, has great respect for some person of his own stamp.

Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.

There is nothing in the world more pitiable than an irresolute man, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them

Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.

What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.

Man must strive, and striving he must err.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.

Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

But the valid issue is the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command.

Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.

It is only in misery that we recognize the hand of God leading good men to good.

All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.

Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.

Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day. [Ger., Der Mensch erfahrt, er sei auch wer er mag, Ein letztes Gluck und einen letzten Tag.]

To live as one likes is plebian the noble man aspires to order and law.

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.

A man may twist as he pleases, and do what he pleases, but he inevitably comes back to the track to which nature has destined him.

He only fears men who does not know them, and he who avoids them will soon misjudge them.

Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.

In society every man is taken for what he gives himself out to be; but he must give himself out to be something. Better to be slightly disagreeable than altogether insignificant.

Man errs as long as he strives.

The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.

The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.

Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.

Noble be man, helpful and good!

It is natural to man to regard himself as the final cause of creation.

A noble man is led by woman's gentle words.

The few of understanding, vision rare, Who veiled not from the herd their hearts, but tried, Poor generous fools, to lay their feelings bare, Them have men always burnt and crucified.

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.

He is a man whom it is impossible to please, because he is never pleased with himself.

To a valet no man is a hero. [Ger., Es gibt fur den Kammerdiener keiner Helden.]

Man usually believes, if only words he hears, That also with them goes material for thinking. [Ger., Gewohnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hort, Es musse sich dabei doch auch was denken.]

The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.