Quotes on Men

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.

The earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

If there is confusion in your head and in your heart, what more do you want! A man who no longer loves and no longer errs should have himself buried straight away.

I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift of God, by Jesus Christ, and the work of it is supernatural. It is done by the Lord Himself, and He has power to do it, however weak, no, however dead in sin, the sinner may be!

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!

Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome

It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.

It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.