Quotes on Men

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

It is in times of difficulty that great nations like great men display the whole energy of their character and become an object of admiration to posterity.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

The happiness and unhappiness of men depends as much on their ethics as on fortune.

Nothing but man of all envenomed things, doth work upon itself, with inborn stings.

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.

How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.

The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.

I am not eternity, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day.

Rich men are to bear the infirmities of the poor. Wise men are to bear the mistakes of the ignorant. Strong men are to bear with the feeble. Cultured people are to bear with the rude and vulgar. If a rough and coarse man meets an ecstatically fine man, the man that is highest up is to be the servant of the man that is lowest down.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.