Quotes on Men

Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.

Man is very much a creature of habit. A thing that rarely strikes his senses will generally have but little influence upon his mind. A government continually at a distance and out of sight, can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of the people. The inference is, that the authority of the Union, and the affections of the citizens towards it, will be strengthened rather than weakened by its extension to what are called matters of internal concern.

The smaller the number and the more permanent and conspicuous the station of men in power, the stronger must be the interest which they will individually feel in whatever concerns the government.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other, and the former will be objects to which the latter attach themselves.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

. . . man is just what he thinks himself to be . . . He will attract to himself what the thinks most about. He can learn to govern his own destiny when he learns to control his thoughts.

The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.

I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations - to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of both

A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.

Whenever I find a great deal of gratitude in a poor man, I take it for granted there would be as much generosity if he were a rich man.

Faith fills a man with love for the beauty of its truth, with faith in the truth of its beauty

I was complaining that I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet.

The gratitude ascending from man to God is the supreme transaction between earth and heaven.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

...The baptized in their sense of mission, through prayer, the witness of life and Christian commitment in all its forms, so that all the faithful may become missionaries in the places where they live and that vocations will come forth to proclaim the Gospel to men who do not yet know it.

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men.

Even for learned men, love of fame is the last thing to be given up.

Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.