Quotes on Men

The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.

Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Character is tested by true sentiments more than by conduct. A man is seldom better than his word.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

A brave man thinks no one his superior who does him an injury, for he has it then in his power to make himself superior to the other by forgiving it.

A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.

Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was_x000D_ _x000D_ "To know that nothing could be known;" a pleasant_x000D_ _x000D_ Science enough, which levels to an ass_x000D_ _x000D_ Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present._x000D_ _x000D_ Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas!_x000D_ _x000D_ Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,_x000D_ _x000D_ That he himself felt only "like a youth_x000D_ _x000D_ Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth."

If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?

Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

It is within the power of every man to live his life nobly, but of no man to live forever. Yet so many of us hope that life will go on forever, and so few aspire to live nobly.

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"

A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.