Men of wit. [ French ]
Boys will be men. [ Proverb ]
Business makes men. [ French ]
All men are not men. [ Proverb ]
Great men are sincere. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Old men are soon angry. [ Proverb ]
Men are led by trifles. [ Napoleon ]
Blind men must not run. [ Proverb ]
All men cannot be first. [ Proverb ]
Rich men have no faults. [ Proverb ]
More molehills than men. [ Proverb ]
All men have their price. [ Ascribed to Walpole ]
Sorrow makes men sincere. [ Beecher ]
Angry men seldom want woe. [ Proverb ]
Friendship's the privilege
Of private men. [ N. Tate ]
Men make the best friends. [ La Bruyere ]
Hot men harbour no malice. [ Proverb ]
In the busy haunts of men. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
All men cannot be masters. [ Proverb ]
Of young men die many,
Of old men escape not any. [ Proverb ]
Turtle makes all men equal. [ Beaconsfield ]
All men are poets at heart. [ Emerson ]
Men meet; mountains, never. [ Lewis Cass ]
So many men, so many minds.
Good men are a public good. [ Proverb ]
Amid life's quests
That seems but worthy one -
to do men good. [ Bailey ]
Love is the sin of all men. [ Du Bosc ]
Great hopes make great men. [ Proverb ]
Old men are twice children. [ Proverb ]
Rich men long to be richer. [ Proverb ]
Crafty men deal in generals. [ Proverb ]
Women do not fancy timid men. [ Mme. Deluzy ]
Poverty makes men ridiculous. [ Proverb ]
Men are wiser than they know. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
All men desire to be immortal. [ Theodore Parker ]
As many men, so many opinions. [ Terence ]
Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men. [ Milton ]
Dignities change men's morals.
Great gifts are for great men. [ Proverb ]
Golden roofs break men's rest. [ Seneca ]
Who the race of men doth love,
Loves also him above. [ Lewis Morris ]
Men hate those they have hurt. [ Proverb ]
Great men are not always wise. [ Bible ]
Men are the dream of a shadow. [ Pindar ]
Riches alone make no men happy. [ Proverb ]
Great men have their parasites. [ Sydney Smith ]
Words are women, deeds are men. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
A little nonsense now and then,
Is relished by the best of men. [ Anon ]
That is true which all men say. [ Proverb ]
There are no laws for just men. [ German Proverb ]
Full of men, vacant of friends. [ Seneca ]
Hungry men think the cook lazy. [ Proverb ]
Children are poor men's riches. [ Proverb ]
Now all is done that men can do
And all is done in vain. [ Burns ]
Choleric men are blind and mad. [ Proverb ]
Whom great men wrong, they hate. [ Proverb ]
Poverty makes men poor spirited. [ Proverb ]
Old men feel young men's knocks. [ Proverb ]
Young men may die, old men must. [ Proverb ]
Deaf men go away with the blame. [ Proverb ]
Injurious men brook no injuries. [ Proverb ]
Blind men's wives need no paint. [ Proverb ]
Men practice war; beasts do not. [ Seneca ]
Most men worship the rising sun. [ Proverb ]
Men are still children at sixty. [ Aubert ]
I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river.
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever. [ Tennyson ]
Dead men open living men's eyes. [ Spanish Proverb ]
Men get wealth and women keep it. [ Proverb ]
Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
The opinions of men are fallible. [ Ovid ]
Old men think themselves cunning. [ Proverb ]
Amongst good men two men suffice. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Covetous men are shamefully rich. [ Proverb ]
Wise men may chance to be caught. [ Proverb ]
Positive men err most of any men. [ Proverb ]
Poor men's reasons are not heard. [ Proverb ]
Men talk only to conceal the mind. [ Young ]
Not God above gets all men's love. [ Proverb ]
'Tis an old maxim in the schools
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit. [ Swift ]
Men of few words are the best men. [ William Shakespeare ]
Genius will reconcile men to much. [ Carlyle ]
The mighty hopes that make us men. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Long-travelled in the ways of men. [ Young ]
Lest men suspect your tale untrue,
Keep probability in view. [ Gay ]
Land of lost gods and godlike men. [ Byron of_ _Greece ]
Adversity reminds men of religion. [ Livy ]
Poor men's tables are soon spread. [ Proverb ]
Happy men shall have many friends. [ Proverb ]
Men make laws; women make manners. [ De Segur ]
Lucky men are favorites of Heaven. [ Dryden ]
Men are less forgiving than women. [ Richardson ]
It is an old maxim in the schools
That flattery's the food for fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit,
Will condescend to take a bit. [ Swift ]
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never. [ Percy ]
Virtuous men alone possess friends. [ Voltaire ]
Birds pay equal honours to all men. [ Proverb ]
I am not in the roll of common men. [ William Shakespeare ]
Cut men's throats with whisperings. [ Ben Jonson ]
God does not measure men by inches. [ Scotch Proverb ]
None but great men can do mischief. [ Proverb ]
The best men have their weaknesses. [ R. Hall ]
Other men's pains are easily borne. [ Cervantes ]
Men like to talk of what they love. [ Proverb ]
Nature has inclined us to love men. [ Cicero ]
Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain.
And make men giddy, proud and vain;
By this the fool commands the wise;
The noble with the base complies;
The sot assumes the role of wit.
And cowards make the base submit. [ Butler ]
Great men never require experience. [ Beaconsfield ]
Neutral men are the devil's allies. [ Chapin ]
Brave men do not boast nor bluster,
Deeds, not words, speak for such. [ Rivarol ]
That must be true which all men say. [ Proverb ]
Men have marble, women wasen, minds. [ Shakespeare ]
Golden dreams make men awake hungry. [ Proverb ]
Guilty consciences make men cowards. [ Vanbrugh ]
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet, The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! [ Longfellow ]
O good gray head which all men knew. [ Tennyson ]
Nothing makes men sharper than want. [ Addison ]
Monuments, like men, submit to fate. [ Pope ]
Men may bear till their backs break. [ Proverb ]
All men think their enemies ill men. [ Proverb ]
My equal he will be again
Down in that cold oblivious gloom,
Where all the prostrate ranks of men
Crowd without fellowship, the tomb. [ J. Montgomery ]
The tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony. [ Rich. II ]
Humanity is great but men are small. [ Börne ]
Virtue is tied to no degrees of men. [ Proverb ]
War must not be waged by men asleep. [ Proverb ]
Some men's ugliness is hard to beat. [ G. D. Prentice ]
She that with poetry is won.
Is but a desk to write upon;
And what men say of her they mean
No more than on the thing they lean. [ Butler ]
Follow a shadow, it still flies you.
Seem to fly it, it will pursue:
So court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.
Say are not women truly then,
Styled but the shadows of us men? [ Ben Jonson ]
Wise men have reason, other men wit. [ Proverb ]
Most men have a thorn at their door. [ Proverb ]
A bit and a knock, as men feed apes. [ Proverb ]
Men of cold passions have quick eyes. [ Hawthorne ]
Men are what their mothers made them. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
In sports and journeys men are known. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
More men are terrified than punished. [ Proverb ]
But we all are men.
In our own natures frail; and capable
Of our flesh, few are angels. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men are not to be measured by inches. [ Proverb ]
Necessity makes dastards valiant men. [ Robert Herrick ]
All great men are partially inspired. [ Cicero ]
Happy were men if they but understood
There is no safety but in doing good. [ John Fountain ]
Six feet of earth make all men equal. [ Proverb ]
Old men that dandle madams hug death. [ Proverb ]
The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon Him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that He on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those,
Whom He to follow Him hath chose. [ Izaak Walton ]
Words are for women, actions for men. [ Proverb ]
Make knowledge circle with the winds;
But let her herald, Reverence, fly
Before her to whatever sky
Bear seed of men and growth of minds. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
It is your virtue, being men, to try;
And it is ours, by virtue to deny. [ Drayton ]
Men apt to promise are apt to forget. [ Proverb ]
Of a truth men are mystically united. [ Carlyle ]
Night, when deep sleep falleth on men. [ Bible ]
Blind men should not judge of colours. [ Proverb ]
Appearances deceive
And this one maxim is a standing rule:
Men are not what they seem. [ Havard ]
Idle men are dead all their life long. [ Proverb ]
The vices of some men are magnificent. [ Lamb ]
Men may rise on steppingstones
Of their dead selves to higher things. [ Tennyson ]
Without great men nothing can be done. [ Renan ]
The gods play games with men as balls. [ Plautus ]
Honest men are justified by the light. [ Proverb ]
He thought the World to him was known,
Whereas he only knew the Town;
In men this blunder still you find,
All think their little set - Mankind. [ Hannah More ]
The more men have, the more they want. [ Justin ]
Accidents rule men, not men accidents. [ Herodotus ]
Base souls have no faith in great men. [ Rousseau ]
Few men are admired by their servants. [ Montaigne ]
No greater men are now than ever were. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Honest men marry soon, wise men never. [ Scotch ]
Men are nearly as capricious as women. [ Chamfort ]
Most men cry, Long live the conqueror. [ Proverb ]
The less men think the more they talk. [ Montesquieu ]
A shameless woman is the worst of men. [ Young ]
All men would be cowards if they durst. [ Earl of Rochester ]
Fools admire, but men of sense approve. [ Pope ]
The deeds of men never escape the gods. [ Ovid ]
Misfortunes make men talk loquaciously. [ Appian ]
Wise men have but few of their society. [ Proverb ]
Live not upon the opinion of other men. [ Proverb ]
Great men's vices are accounted sacred. [ Proverb ]
Other men's ills are slightly regarded. [ Proverb ]
Great men should not have great faults. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Thou bringest the sailor to his wife.
And travell'd men from foreign lands,
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. [ Tennyson ]
Praises from wicked men are reproaches. [ Proverb ]
Honest men are the gentlemen of nature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Even weak men when united are powerful. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Best men oft are moulded out of faults. [ William Shakespeare ]
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. [ Edward Bulwer Lytton ]
Stern men with empires in their brains. [ Lowell ]
Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own. [ Lowell ]
He doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. [ Jul. Caes ]
Money often unmakes the men who make it. [ Proverb ]
Prosperous men seldom mend their faults. [ Proverb ]
We frequently misplace esteem,
By judging men by what they seem,
To birth, wealth, power, we should allow
Precedence, and our lowest bow. [ Gay ]
Wine hath drowned more men than the sea. [ Proverb ]
Where the hedge is lowest men leap over. [ Proverb ]
Play, women, and wine undo men laughing. [ Proverb ]
Inexperienced men think all things easy. [ Proverb ]
Rich men's spots are covered with money. [ Proverb ]
Weak men and cowards are generally wily. [ Proverb ]
Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. [ Selden ]
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord. [ Rich. II ]
Desperate evils generally make men safe. [ Seneca ]
Kings alone are no more than single men. [ Proverb ]
Be strong, and quit yourselves like men. [ Bible ]
All men, well interrogated, answer well. [ Plato ]
Men hate those to whom they have to lie. [ Victor Hugo ]
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home. [ Edmund Waller ]
Brave men are brave from the very first. [ Corneille ]
Fools tie knots and wise men loose them. [ Proverb ]
On their own merits modest men are dumb. [ George Colman ]
Reason gains all men by compelling none. [ Aaron Hill ]
Deaf men are quick-eyed and distrustful. [ Proverb ]
The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation; that away,
Men are but gilded loam or painted clay. [ Rich. II ]
Are not great men the models of nations? [ Owen Meredith ]
Mean men admire wealth, great men glory. [ Proverb ]
The worst men often give the best advice. [ Bailey ]
Commonsense among men of fortune is rare. [ Juvenal ]
Let us think less of men and more of God. [ Bailey ]
Perhaps the early grave
Which men weep over may be meant to save. [ Byron ]
Behold the Sea,
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not. [ Emerson ]
Covetous men's chests are rich, not they. [ Proverb ]
Men work but slowly that have poor wages. [ Proverb ]
Great men have more adorers than friends. [ Proverb ]
All men are equal before the natural law. [ Law Maxim ]
Wise men may well be mistaken in futures. [ Proverb ]
Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them. [ Proverb ]
Virtue's office never breaks men's troth. [ William Shakespeare ]
Often times to please fools wise men err. [ Proverb ]
What men call accident is God's own part. [ Bailey ]
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight.
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Far from gay cities, and the ways of men. [ Homer ]
Lord, help me through this warld o' care,
I'm weary sick o't late and air;
Not but I hae a richer share
Than mony ithers;
But why should ae man better fare,
And a' men brithers? [ Burns ]
These are the times that try men's souls. [ Thomas Paine ]
The very best men stand in need of pardon. [ Proverb ]
Free soil, free men, free speech, Fremont. [ Republican Rallying Cry, 1856 ]
Rakes are more suspicious than honest men. [ Richardson ]
Covetous men live drudges to die wretches. [ Proverb ]
Truly great men are always simple-hearted. [ Klinger ]
Just death, kind umpire of men's miseries. [ William Shakespeare ]
Women and wine make men out of their wits. [ Proverb ]
Young men want to be faithful and are not,
old men want to be faithless and cannot. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Honest men never have the love of a rogue. [ Proverb ]
Fools may sometimes give wise men counsel. [ Proverb ]
Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,
And men below and saints above;
For love is heaven, and heaven is love. [ Scott ]
Jove lifts the golden balances that show
The fates of mortal men, and things below. [ Homer ]
Bribes throw dust into cunning men's eyes. [ Proverb ]
Men would be angels; angels would be gods. [ Pope ]
Other men's failings accuse us of frailty. [ Proverb ]
Let guilty men remember, their black deeds
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds. [ John Webster ]
Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune. [ Garibaldi ]
All great men are in some degree inspired. [ Cicero ]
On some men's bread butter will not stick. [ Proverb ]
The bravest men are subject most to chance. [ Dryden ]
Men blush to be cured by a shameful remedy. [ Proverb ]
Rich men have often the hearts of poor men. [ Proverb ]
This barren verbiage current among men.
Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. [ Tennyson ]
Proud men cannot bear with pride in others. [ Proverb ]
Quartane agues kill old men and cure young. [ Proverb ]
Angels contented with their face in heaven.
Seek not the praise of men. [ Milton ]
Men shut their doors against a setting sun. [ William Shakespeare ]
Fools are wise men in the affairs of women. [ Proverb ]
Men that hazard all
Do it in hope of fair advantages:
A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross. [ William Shakespeare ]
Socrates
Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced,
Wisest of men. [ Milton ]
Young men are made wise, old men become so. [ Proverb ]
Curst be the gold and silver which persuade
Weak men to follow far fatiguing trade!
The lily peace outshines the silver store,
And life is dearer than the golden ore.
Yet money tempts us over the desert brown,
To every distant mart and wealthy town. [ Collins ]
Men are but children of a larger growth;
Our appetites are apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving, too, and full as vain. [ Dryden ]
Men conceal the past scenes of their lives. [ [Lucretius ]
When Fortune means to men most good,
She looks upon them with a threatening eye. [ William Shakespeare ]
So many men in court and so many strangers. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Where men are kindly used they will resort. [ Proverb ]
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. [ Lamb ]
The greatest clerks are not the wisest men. [ Proverb ]
The bloom or blight of all men's happiness. [ Byron ]
Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell. [ William Shakespeare ]
Brave deeds are the monuments of brave men. [ Napoleon I ]
There is something of all men in every man. [ Lichtenberg ]
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself. [ William Shakespeare ]
The world knows nothing of its greatest men. [ Henry Taylor ]
Experience is the only prophecy of wise men. [ Lamartine ]
Men dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake! [ Pope ]
Fools build houses, and wise men enjoy them. [ Proverb ]
Your face, my Thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters. [ William Shakespeare ]
He is wiser than most men are who is honest. [ Proverb ]
The greater scholars are not the wisest men. [ Proverb ]
Rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words,
With better appetite. [ William Shakespeare ]
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. [ William Shakespeare ]
Good men but see death, the wicked taste it. [ Ben Jonson ]
There are more men threatened than stricken. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
There is no vague general capability in men. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Maids make much of one; good men are scarce. [ Proverb ]
All things that great men do, are well done. [ Proverb ]
Wise men care not for what they cannot have. [ Proverb ]
Fools set stools tor wise men to stumble at. [ Proverb ]
Threatened men eat bread, says the Spaniard. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Literary men are ... a perpetual priesthood. [ Carlyle ]
Woe unto you when all men speak well of you. [ Bible ]
Men that are crafty deal mostly in generals. [ Proverb ]
Abundance is a blessing to the wise;
The use of riches in discretion lies:
Learn this, ye men of wealth - a heavy purse
In a fool's pocket is a heavy curse. [ Cumberland ]
Do not insult calamity:
It is a barbarous grossness to lay on
The weight of scorn, where heavy misery
Too much already weighs men's fortunes down. [ Daniel ]
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise. [ Solomon ]
Proneness to sin cleaves fast to mortal men. [ Theognis ]
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch enchanter's wand! itself a nothing!
But taking sorcery from the master hand.
To paralyze the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The greatest merit of some men is their wife. [ Poincelot ]
Many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
Uncertain and unsettled still remains -
Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself. [ Milton ]
If women were humbler, men would be honester. [ Vanbrugh ]
Are you called forth from out a world of men,
To slay the innocent? [ William Shakespeare ]
I pity bashful men, who feel the pain,
Of fancied scorn and undeserved disdain,
And bear the marks upon a blushing face,
Of needless shame, and self-imposed disgrace. [ Cowper ]
Young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes. [ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Sc. 3 ]
Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own. [ William Cowper ]
'Tis good for men to love their present pains
Upon example; so the spirit is eased. [ William Shakespeare ]
All great men come out of the middle classes. [ Emerson ]
The earth now supports many bad and weak men. [ Juv ]
The wisest men are wise to the full in death. [ John Ruskin ]
Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality. [ Colton ]
What a great deal of good great men might do! [ Proverb ]
The world would perish, were ail men learned. [ Proverb ]
Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them. [ Anacharsis ]
O Fortune, Fortune! all men call thee fickle. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot. [ Pope ]
What fates impose, that men must needs abide;
It boots not to resist both wind and tide. [ William Shakespeare ]
Government should direct poor men what to do. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
When fiction rises pleasing to the eye,
Men will believe, because they love the lie;
But truth herself, if clouded with a frown,
Must have some solemn proof to pass her down. [ Churchill ]
Few men have been admired by their domestics. [ Montaigne ]
And sing to those that hold the vital shears;
And turn the adamantine spindle round,
On which the fate of gods and men is wound. [ Milton ]
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men in rage strike those that wish them best. [ William Shakespeare ]
Fortune does not change men: it unmasks them. [ Mme. Necker ]
See what money can do: that can change
Men's manners; alter their conditions!
How tempestuous the slaves are without it!
O thou powerful metal! what authority
Is in thee! thou art the key to all mens
Mouths: with thee, a man may lock up the jaws
Of an informer; and without thee, he
Cannot open the lips of a lawyer. [ Richard Brome ]
Young men soon give and soon forget affronts;
Old age is slow in both. [ Addison ]
There are a kind of men so loose of soul
That in their sleep will utter their affairs. [ William Shakespeare ]
Old men and travellers may lie with authority. [ Proverb ]
Do as most do, and men will speak well of you. [ Proverb ]
Philosophers are only men in armour after all. [ Dickens ]
Men are more prone to pleasure than to virtue. [ Cicero ]
At the sight of a man we too say to ourselves,
Let us be men. [ Amiel ]
Men at most differ as heaven and earth,
But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
To have heard the voice
Of Godhead in the winds and in the seas,
To have known him in the circling of the suns,
And in the changeful fates and lives of men. [ Lewis Morris ]
They say, best men are moulded out of faults;
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad. [ William Shakespeare ]
One only thought can enter every head;
The thought of golf, to wit - and that engages
Men of all sizes, tempers, ranks and ages. [ G. F. Carnegie ]
Wise men make proverbs, and fools repeat them. [ Proverb ]
God sends experience to paint men's portraits. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
The world boasts that it can render men happy! [ Massillon ]
Old men go to death; death comes to young men. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Honest men's words are as good as their bonds. [ Proverb ]
Men who have much to say use the fewest words. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war.
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream:
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden haste. [ William Shakespeare ]
Bloody and deceitful men dig their own graves. [ Proverb ]
Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die. [ Young ]
There is music in all things, If men had ears. [ Byron ]
Fools and obstinate men make the lawyers rich. [ Proverb ]
Fortune in men has some small difference made.
One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade. [ Pope ]
Love with men is not a sentiment, but an idea. [ Mme. de Girardin ]
How oft, when men are at the point of death.
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men acquire acuteness; women are born with it.
Men seek less to be instructed than applauded. [ Proverb ]
There is a variety in the tempers of good men. [ Atterbury ]
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. [ Byron ]
Till taught by pain,
Men really know not what good water's worth:
If you had been in Turkey or in Spain,
Or with a famish'd boat's crew had your berth,
Or in the desert heard the camel's bell,
You'd wish yourself where truth is - in a well. [ Byron ]
Greatness, with private men
Esteem'd a blessing, is to me a curse;
And we, whom from our high births they conclude
The only free men, are the only slaves:
Happy the golden mean. [ Massinger ]
There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls. [ William Shakespeare ]
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows, and in miseries:
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. [ William Shakespeare ]
It is not so with Him that all things knows
As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows:
But most it is presumption in us when
The help of heaven we count the act of men. [ William Shakespeare ]
No man was ever as rich as all men ought to be. [ Old saying ]
Great men will always pay deference to greater. [ Landor ]
The best-concerted schemes men lay for fame.
Die fast away; only themselves die faster.
The far-famed sculptor, and the laurelled bard,
Those bold insurancers of deathless fame,
Supply their little feeble aids in vain. [ Blair ]
The failings of other men accuse us of frailty. [ Proverb ]
This world is God's workshop for making men in. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Honest men fear neither the light nor the dark. [ Proverb ]
Old age though despised, is coveted by all men. [ Proverb ]
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. [ Goldsmith ]
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd. [ Milton ]
That I might live alone once with my gold!
Oh 't is a sweet companion I kind and true!
A man may trust it, when his father cheats him,
Brother, or friend, or wife. O wondrous pelf.
That which makes all men false, is true itself. [ Jonson ]
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. [ Plato ]
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels men rebel;
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against the Eternal cause. [ Pope ]
The desert is mute, and dead men tell no tales. [ Laboulaye ]
Men may become old, but they never become good. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away. [ Wordsworth ]
Praise makes good men better and bad men worse. [ Proverb ]
The best of men have ever loved repose;
They hate to mingle in the filthy fray;
Where the soul sours, and gradual rancour grows,
Imbitter'd more from peevish day to day. [ Thomson ]
From powerful causes spring the empiric's gains.
Man's love of life, his weakness, and his pains;
These first induce him the vile trash to try,
Then lend his name that other men may buy. [ Crabbe ]
The stars govern men, but God governs the stars.
Power above powers!
O heavenly eloquence!
That with the strong rein of commanding words,
Dost manage, guide, and master the eminence
Of men's affections, more than all their swords! [ Daniel ]
The worst of men are those who will not forgive. [ Proverb ]
Even bees, the little alms-men of spring bowers,
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers. [ Keats ]
As the touchstone tries gold, so gold tries men. [ Proverb ]
Men of business must not break their word twice. [ Proverb ]
Anger makes dull men witty, but keeps them poor. [ Bacon ]
Years do not make sages; they only make old men. [ Madame Swetchine ]
Dead men are of no family, and are akin to none. [ Proverb ]
All men have desires, but all men have not love.
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song. [ Shelley ]
I've learned to judge of men by their own deeds;
I do not make the accident of birth
The standard of their merit. [ Mrs. Hale ]
Great deeds immortal are - they cannot die,
Unscathed by envious blight or withering frost,
They live, and bud, and bloom; and men partake
Still of their freshness, and are strong thereby. [ Aytoun ]
Oh! nature's noblest gift - my grey goosed quill:
Slave of my thoughts, obedient to my will,
Torn from thy parent bird to form a pen,
That mighty instrument of little men! [ Byron ]
Men love little and often, women much and rarely. [ Basta ]
Resolve, resolve, and to be men aspire.
Exert that noblest privilege, alone
Here to mankind indulged; control desire:
Let godlike Reason, from her sovereign throne,
Speak the commanding word I will! and it is done. [ Thomson ]
Men generally look more upon decency than virtue. [ Proverb ]
Great men may jest with saints; 'tis wit in them,
But in the less, foul profanation. [ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure ]
Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination. [ Rousseau ]
It is good pride to desire to be the best of men. [ Proverb ]
Some men go through a forest and see no firewood. [ Proverb ]
Some men plant an opinion they seem to eradicate. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men are misers, and women prodigal, in affection. [ Lamartine ]
Death, so called, is a thing that makes men weep,
And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep. [ Byron ]
The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment. [ Hillard ]
Greatness, once fallen out with fortune,
Must fall out with men too; what the declined is,
He shall as soon read in the eyes of others
As feel in his own fall. [ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ]
A drop of ink has not only saved men but nations. [ J. Baldwin Brown ]
Cowards die many times before their deaths:
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come. [ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar ]
Some men are born to feast, and not to fight;
Whose sluggish minds, e'en in fair honor's field.
Still on their dinner turn -
Let such pot-boiling varlets stay at home,
And wield a flesh-hook rather than a sword. [ Joanna Baillie ]
Science seldom renders men amiable; women, never. [ Beauchene ]
Gold! gold! in all ages the curse of mankind,
Thy fetters are forged for the soul and the mind.
The limbs may be free as the wings of a bird.
And the mind be the slave of a look and a word.
To gain thee men barter eternity's crown,
Yield honour, affection, and lasting renown. [ Park Benjamin ]
Great countries are those that produce great men. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Brave men ought not to be cast down by adversity. [ Silius Italicus ]
Venus, thy eternal sway all the race of men obey. [ Euripides ]
Men of cruelty are birds of the devil's hatching. [ Proverb ]
In the kingdom of blind men the one-eyed is king. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Show is not substance; realities govern wise men. [ William Penn ]
Wanton jests make fools laugh and wise men frown. [ Fuller ]
Trouble teaches men how much there is in manhood. [ Ward Beecher ]
All great poets have been men of great knowledge. [ Bryant ]
It is only in little matters that men are cowards. [ W. H. Herbert ]
Men that have much business must have much pardon. [ Proverb ]
He that hoards up money takes pains for other men. [ Proverb ]
If men had not slept, the tares had not been sown. [ Proverb ]
One destined period men in common have,
The great, the base, the coward, and the brave.
All food alike for worms, companions in the grave. [ Lansdowne ]
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
These are not done by jostling in the street. [ Wm. Blake ]
Men are women's playthings; women are the devil's. [ Victor Hugo ]
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark. [ Bacon ]
Men are the cause of women not loving one another. [ La Bruyere ]
Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best. [ Byron ]
Fate holds the strings, and men like children move
But as they're led; success is from above. [ Lord Lansdowne ]
Offenses generally outweigh merits with great men. [ Proverb ]
Circumstances do not make men: they discover them. [ Lamennais ]
Some men's no is better received than other's yea. [ Proverb ]
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading;
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not;
But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer. [ William Shakespeare, Henry VIII ]
Few men have been looked up to by their domestics. [ Montaigne ]
Fools may invent fashions that wise men will wear. [ Proverb ]
Men know life too early, women know life too late. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
There is a remedy for everything could men find it. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Old men, when they scorn young, make much of death. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men may second fortune, but they cannot thwart her. [ Machiavelli ]
Men possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with. [ Froude ]
It is comparison that makes men happy or miserable. [ Proverb ]
When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks. [ William Shakespeare ]
Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than hunger. [ Jean Paul ]
The highest subject of art for thinking men is man. [ Winkelmann ]
No errors are so mischievous as those of great men. [ Proverb ]
It is the men, not the houses, that makes the city. [ Proverb ]
Men say, By pride the angels fell from heaven.
By pride they reached a place from which they fell. [ Joaquin Miller ]
This fellow must have a rare understanding;
For nature recompenseth the defects
Of one part with redundance in another;
Blind men have excellent memories, and the tongue
Thus indisposed, there's treasure in the intellect. [ Shirley ]
Women commiserate the brave, and men the beautiful. [ Landor ]
There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world.
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell,
I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none. [ William Shakespeare ]
What poor creatures we men are, when I think of it. [ Plaut ]
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. [ Victor Hugo ]
Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. [ William Shakespeare ]
He that waits for dead men's shoes may go barefoot. [ Proverb ]
Trust none,
For oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer cakes.
And hold-fast is the only doer. [ William Shakespeare ]
The gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods. [ Heraclitus ]
Tale-bearers are commonly a sort of half-witted men. [ Proverb ]
Look on the bee upon the wing among flowers;
How brave, how bright his life! then mark him hiv'd,
Cramp'd, cringing in his self-built, social cell,
Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men
Lie deep in cities as in drifts. [ Bailey ]
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. [ Washington ]
Fools bite one another, but wise men agree together. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing:
That she beloved knows naught, that knows not this -
Men prize the thing ungamed more than it is. [ William Shakespeare ]
Dreams, which, beneath the hov'ring shades of night.
Sport with the ever-restless minds of men.
Descend not from the gods. Each busy brain
Creates its own. [ Thomas Love Peacock ]
It is for want of thinking that most men are undone. [ Proverb ]
Health and sickness surely are men's double enemies. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Incredulity should make men advised, not irresolute. [ Proverb ]
Good men must die, but death cannot kill them quite. [ Proverb ]
I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Nor actions, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. [ William Shakespeare ]
There are more men ennobled by study than by nature. [ Cicero ]
Women have more heart and more imagination than men. [ Lamartine ]
Men may be ungrateful, but the human race is not so. [ De Boufflers ]
Men are so unjust that to be unhappy is to be wrong. [ Mme. du Puisieux ]
Where knaves fall out, honest men come by their own. [ Proverb ]
To continue good amongst ill men, that is the point. [ Proverb ]
Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason. [ W. R. Alger ]
Gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou may'st not sell. [ Shakespeare ]
Men do nothing excellent but by imitation of nature. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Men are the cause of women's dislike for each other. [ La Bruyere ]
Men's actions are not to be judged of at first sight. [ Proverb ]
Men marry to make an end; women, to make a beginning. [ A. Dupuy ]
Men fear death, as children fear going into the dark. [ Proverb ]
Ignorant men differ from beasts only in their figure. [ Cleanthes ]
Men and pyramids are not made to stand on their head. [ G. K. Pfeffel ]
Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Suffering is the mother of fools, reason of wise men.
Dissimulation creeps gradually into the minds of men. [ Cicero ]
Jul: They do not love that do not show their love.
Luc: O, they love least that let men know their love! [ William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act I. Sc. 2 ]
He teaches best.
Who feels the hearts of all men in his breast,
And knows their strength or weakness through his own. [ Bayard Taylor ]
Men speak of the fair as things went with them there. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Likeness begets love, yet proud men hate one another. [ Proverb ]
Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things. [ Samuel Madden ]
These little things are great to little men.(Trifles) [ Goldsmith ]
Wise men may look ridiculous in the company of fools. [ Proverb ]
After crosses and losses, men grow humbler and wiser. [ Franklin ]
Few men will be better than their interest bids them. [ Proverb ]
Men have less lively perception of good than of evil. [ Livy ]
I have heard they are the most lewd impostors,
Made of all terms and shreds, no less beliers
Of great men's favours than their own vile medicines,
Which they will utter upon monstrous oaths;
Selling that drug for two pence ere they part.
Which they have valued at twelve crowns before. [ Ben Jonson ]
All men's faces are true, whatsoever their hands are. [ William Shakespeare ]
The great fault in women is to desire to be like men. [ De Maistre ]
Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men. [ Lowell ]
Vicious Men overvalue vanity; and undervalue vexation. [ Proverb ]
Rich men and fortunate men have need of much prudence. [ Proverb ]
Men err from selfishness, women because they are weak. [ Mme. de Stael ]
Silent men, like still waters, are deep and dangerous. [ Proverb ]
Drunkenness makes men fools; some beasts, some devils. [ Proverb ]
Loud-dressing men and women have also loud characters. [ Haliburton ]
Merit is born with men; happy those with whom it dies! [ Queen Christina ]
If you would compare two men, you must know them both. [ Proverb ]
Critics are men who have failed in literature and art. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
There must first be seducing men before seduced women. [ Jean Paul ]
Men lie, who lack courage to tell truth - the cowards! [ Joaquin Miller ]
Thank God, men that are greatly guilty are never wise. [ Burke ]
Men believe that willingly which they wish to be true. [ Caesar ]
Trees and fields tell me nothing; men are my teachers. [ Plato ]
All men naturally have some love and liking for truth. [ Proverb ]
Bad men excuse their faults; good men will leave them. [ Ben Jonson ]
Young men should be learners, when old men are actors. [ Proverb ]
I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff. [ Sir Henry Wotton ]
Men bestow compliments only on women who deserve none. [ Mme. Bachi ]
Men do not value a good deed unless it brings a reward. [ Ovid ]
Better fare hard with good men, than feast it with bad. [ Proverb ]
Seek only to mystify men; to satisfy them is difficult. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the theatre-manager in "Faust." ]
Society is the union of men and not the men themselves. [ Montesquieu ]
Great vices, as well as great virtues, make men famous. [ Proverb ]
Some men are like cats, they always fall on their feet. [ Anthony Collins ]
It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men. [ Sheridan ]
Cowards run the greatest danger of any men in a battle. [ Proverb ]
What constitutes a state?... Men who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain. [ Sir William Jones ]
For my own part, I shall be glad to learn of noble men. [ William Shakespeare ]
Certainly the greatest scholars are not the wisest men. [ Regnier ]
What studies please, what most delight.
And fill men's thoughts, they dream them over at night. [ Creech ]
Many men's thoughts are not acorns, but merely pebbles. [ Charles Buxton ]
Drinking of wine maketh men to act like so many furies. [ N. Morton ]
Prefer not the esteem of men to the approbation of God. [ Jortin ]
In most men there is a dead poet whom the man survives. [ Sainte-Beuve ]
Wise men have but few confidants and cunning ones none. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools. [ Proverb ]
Keep not ill men company, lest you increase the number. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Angling is somewhat like poetry; men are to be born so. [ Izaak Walton ]
Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest. [ Jean Paul Richter ]
Honest men and knaves may possibly wear the same cloth. [ Proverb ]
A liar is a bravo towards God and a coward towards men. [ Proverb ]
Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy. [ Aristotle ]
Men's thoughts are much according to their inclination. [ Bacon ]
Wise men learn by other men's harms, fools by their own. [ Proverb ]
To wilful men. The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their school-masters. [ William Shakespeare ]
Women are never disarmed by compliments, men always are. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
He who has no wish to be happier is the happiest of men. [ W. R. Alger ]
The family of the public-spirited men is always extinct. [ Proverb ]
He is a worthy person who is much respected by good men. [ Hitopadesa ]
Better spare to have of thine own than ask of other men. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men speak of what they know; women of what pleases them. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles. [ Burke ]
Hate injures no one; it is contempt that casts men down. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Men may blush to hear what they were not ashamed to act. [ Proverb ]
Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
There are two levers for moving men - interest and fear. [ Napoleon ]
The best teachers of humanity are the lives of great men. [ Charles H. Fowler ]
Men would be saints if they loved God as they love women. [ Saint Thomas ]
Rich men feel misfortunes that fly over poor men's heads. [ Proverb ]
When all men have what belongs to them it cannot be much. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Honest men love women; those who deceive them adore them. [ Beaumarchais ]
It is almost as necessary to know other men as ourselves. [ Proverb ]
Mind is the partial side of men; the heart is everything. [ Rivarol ]
They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain. [ William Shakespeare ]
Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation. [ Goethe ]
Few men have imagination enough for the truth of reality. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. [ Emerson ]
That which makes wise men modest, makes fools unmannerly. [ Proverb ]
Fools lade out all the water, and wise men take the fish. [ Proverb ]
Men are very generous with that which costs them nothing. [ Proverb ]
Honest men are soon bound, but you can never bind a knave. [ Proverb ]
Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds. [ Petrarch ]
Do you want true peace with men? Make your peace with God.
We should all be perfect if we were neither men nor women.
There are more maids than Moggy, and more men than Jockey. [ Proverb ]
Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials. [ Samuel Smiles ]
If you pity rogues, you are no great friend of honest men. [ Proverb ]
Angry men and drunken men, during the fit, are distracted. [ Proverb ]
It is through the feeling of wonder that men philosophise. [ Aristotle ]
Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name. [ Lucan ]
A clever woman has millions of born foes - all stupid men. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]
Men will do more to support a character than to raise one. [ Colton ]
Men more easily renounce their interests than their tastes. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Frequently the curses of men bring the blessings of Heaven. [ Lamennais ]
To some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies. [ William Shakespeare ]
What old men can do always falls short of what they desire. [ A. Ricard ]
Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched. [ Proverb ]
Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves. [ Lowell ]
Men see better into other people's business than their own. [ Seneca ]
One of the principal occupations of men is to divine women. [ Lacretelle ]
In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire. [ Swift ]
Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon. [ Bovee ]
Faith and piety are rare among the men who follow the camp. [ Lucan ]
Old men have one foot in the grave, and many young men too. [ Proverb ]
It is circumstances (difficulties) which show what men are. [ Epictetus ]
It is the opinion of men that makes the reputation of women. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
Good men want the laws for nothing but to defend themselves. [ Proverb ]
Zeal is fit only for wise men, but is found mostly in fools. [ Proverb ]
Birds are entangled by their feet, and men by their tongues. [ Proverb ]
I am satisfied there is more weakness among men than malice. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Of all men, Adam was the happiest - he had no mother-in-law. [ P. Parfait ]
Everybody knows worse of himself than he knows of other men. [ Dr. Johnson ]
To many men well-fitting doors are not set on their tongues. [ Theognis ]
The wicked grow worse, and the good men better from trouble. [ Proverb ]
Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens. [ Daniel Webster ]
Men take less care of their conscience than their reputation. [ Proverb ]
Men do less than they ought unless they do all that they can. [ Carlyle ]
The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts. [ Bovee ]
The enthusiasm of old men is singularly like that of infancy. [ Gerard de Nerval ]
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men. [ Anonymous ]
That is but an empty purse that is full of other men's money. [ Proverb ]
There is nothing that fear or hope does not make men believe. [ Vauvenargues ]
Zeal is fit for wise men, but flourishes chiefly among fools. [ Tillotson ]
In times of misfortune men's understandings even are sullied. [ Hitopadesa ]
A bold fellow is the jest of wise men, and the idol of fools. [ Proverb ]
We come to know best what men are, in their worse jeopardies. [ Daniel ]
Men and cucumbers are worth nothing as soon as they are ripe. [ Jean Paul ]
Old men remember such things as they delighted in when young. [ Proverb ]
Possession makes tyrants of some men whom desire made slaves. [ Brignicourt ]
Books have brought some men to knowledge, and some to madness. [ Petrarch ]
Apes are never more beasts, than when they wear men's clothes. [ Proverb ]
Free men freely work: Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease. [ Mrs. Browning ]
Lose the habit of hard labour with its manliness, and then,
Comes the wreck of all you hope for in the wreck of noble men. [ Dr. Walter Smith ]
How difficult a thing it is, to persuade most men to be happy! [ Proverb ]
It is the prerogative of great men only to have great defects. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Friends are rare, for the good reason that men are not common. [ Joseph Roux ]
Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men. [ Horace ]
How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation! [ Montaigne ]
Audacity as against modesty will win the battle over most men. [ Mme. Deluzy ]
To our graves we walk In the thick footprints of departed men. [ Alex. Smith ]
Gaming, women, and wine, while they laugh, they make men pine. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
We must love men, ere to us they will seem worthy of our love. [ William Shakespeare ]
It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature. [ Beecher ]
Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force. [ Joseph Joubert ]
Wit without wisdom, cuts other men's meat and its own fingers. [ Proverb ]
Knaves are in such repute, that honest men are accounted fools. [ Proverb ]
Wicked men, like mad-men, have sometimes their lucid intervals. [ Proverb ]
Women like brave men exceedingly, but audacious men still more. [ Lemesles ]
Aristotle said ... melancholy men of all others are most witty. [ Burton ]
Passionate men like fleet hounds are apt to over-run the scent. [ Proverb ]
Men speak but little when vanity does not induce them to speak. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Men and women existed before creeds; love is the only religion. [ Mrs. Campbell Praed ]
To live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery. [ Hooker ]
God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's weaknesses. [ Beecher ]
Men are slow to repose confidence in undertakings of magnitude. [ Ovid ]
Men must endure their going hence. Even as their coming hither. [ William Shakespeare ]
If God were not a necessary being of Himself,
He might almost seem to be made for the use and benefit of men. [ John Tillotson ]
Words are wise men's counters, but they are the money of fools. [ Hobbes ]
Ideas are like beards; men do not have them until they grow up. [ Francois M. A. de Voltaire ]
Women are extremists: they are either better or worse than men. [ La Bruyere ]
Even covetous men have sometimes their intervals of generosity. [ Proverb ]
Desire of glory is the last garment that even wise men put off. [ Proverb ]
A noble man attracts noble men, and knows how to hold them fast. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Men's minds are too ingenious in palliating guilt in themselves. [ Livy ]
The real men of genius were resolute workers, not idle dreamers. [ G. H. Lewes ]
Women ask if a man is discreet, as men ask if a woman is pretty.
By silence, I hear other men's imperfections and conceal my own. [ Zeno ]
He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Great men get more by obliging inferiors than by disdaining them. [ South ]
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Melancholy advanceth men's conceits more than any humor whatever. [ Burton ]
Let him say what he will, men have spoken well of God before now. [ Proverb ]
We cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;
We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother's shame;
However we brave it out, we men are a little breed. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
When men speak ill of you, live so that nobody will believe them. [ Burke ]
Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded. [ Amiel ]
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men. [ Confucius ]
Many men kill themselves for love, but many more women die of it. [ Lemontey ]
Old Time, who changes all below to wean men gently for the grave. [ Mrs. Norton ]
Fools may ask more in an hour, than wise men can answer in seven. [ Proverb ]
O that men's ears should be to counsel deaf, but not to flattery! [ Shakespeare ]
Wise men learn something of fools, but fools nothing of wise men. [ Proverb ]
Young men think old men fools; but old men know the young are so. [ Proverb ]
Those wanting wit, affect gravity and go by the name of solid men. [ Dryden ]
If great men would have care of little ones, both would last long. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor. [ Coleridge ]
He had kept the whiteness of his soul, and thus men over him wept. [ Byron ]
The indulgence of revenge tends to make men more savage and cruel. [ Lord Kames ]
We bachelors grin, but you marred men laugh till your hearts ache. [ Proverb ]
O ye gods! what thick encircling darkness blinds the minds of men! [ Ovid ]
However wickedness outstrips men, it has no wings to fly from God. [ Shakespeare ]
Men love better books which please them than those which instruct. [ Dubois ]
All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself. [ Goethe ]
Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water. [ Shakespeare ]
Civilisation tends to corrupt men, as large towns vitiate the air. [ Amiel ]
Children cry for nuts and apples, and old men for gold and silver. [ Proverb ]
Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent. [ Cicero ]
Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power. [ Wm. Ellery Channing ]
Men never think their fortune too great, nor their wit too little. [ Proverb ]
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. [ William Shakespeare ]
Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences. [ Pliny ]
Etiquette is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance. [ Steele ]
If you would have honest men, you must go out of the land for them. [ Proverb ]
A great fondness for animals often results from a knowledge of men.
An hypocrite pays tribute to God, only that he may impose upon men. [ Proverb ]
Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people. [ G. S. Hillard ]
Death alone discloses how insignificant are the puny bodies of men. [ Juvenal ]
Women are extreme in all points. They are better or worse than men. [ Bruyere ]
He that makes himself an ass, must not take it ill if men ride him. [ Proverb ]
Few men are both rich and generous; fewer are both rich and humble. [ Cardinal Manning ]
Women have fewer vices than men; but they have stronger prejudices. [ Dr. J. V. C. Smith ]
An ass that carries a load, is better than a lion that devours men. [ Proverb ]
Men are more prone to revenge injuries, than to requite kindnesses. [ Proverb ]
The ocean waves chase one another down like the generations of men. [ G. Keate ]
Young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be so. [ Camden ]
Experience is the name men give to their follies, or their sorrows. [ A. de Musset ]
I am not only witty myself, but the cause that wit is in other men. [ William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part II Act I Sc. 2 ]
Men never play the fool more, than by endeavouring to be otherwise. [ Proverb ]
Animals feed, men eat; but only men of intelligence know how to eat. [ Brillat-Savarin ]
Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men. [ George Sand ]
Shallow men believe in luck, strong men believe in cause and effect. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Rich men are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors. [ Burton ]
A good man is kinder to his enemy than bad men are to their friends. [ Bishop Hall ]
Ability wins us the esteem of the true men; luck that of the people. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
If you live among men, the heart must either break or turn to brass. [ Chamfort ]
Men possessing small souls are generally the authors of great evils. [ Goethe ]
Catastrophes dispose all strong and intelligent men to philosophize. [ Balzac ]
Greatness, once fallen out with fortune, must fall out with men too. [ William Shakespeare ]
Careless men let their end steal upon them unawares, and unprovided. [ Proverb ]
When two men quarrel, who owns the cooler head is the more to blame. [ Goethe ]
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. [ Johnson ]
Beauty itself doth itself persuade the eyes of men without an orator. [ William Shakespeare ]
Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity. [ La Bruyere ]
The love of liberty is implanted by nature in the breasts of all men. [ Dionysius ]
Women are ever in extremes; they are either better or worse than men. [ Bruyere ]
Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
When men enter into the state of marriage, they stand nearest to God. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
All men are frail; but thou shouldst reckon none so frail as thyself. [ Thomas a Kempis ]
Every fool can find faults, that a great many wise men cannot remedy. [ Proverb ]
Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Better be a poor fisherman than have to do with the governing of men. [ Danton ]
Most men have more courage than even they themselves think they have. [ Greville ]
There is no other revelation than the thoughts of the wise among men. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
Most men employ their first years so as to make their last miserable. [ Proverb ]
Weak men are easily put out of humor. Oil freezes quicker than water. [ Auerbach ]
Covetous men are condemned to dig in the mines for they know not who. [ Proverb ]
Women distrust men too much in general, and not enough in particular. [ Commerson ]
Where would the power of women be, were it not for the vanity of men? [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]
Great men rejoice in adversity just as brave soldiers triumph in war. [ Seneca ]
But revenge is a blessing sweeter than life itself; so rude men feel. [ Juv ]
Money will buy money's worth: but the thing men call fame, what is it? [ Carlyle ]
Men that make envy and crooked malice nourishment, dare bite the best. [ William Shakespeare ]
The saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all. [ Coleridge ]
The society of women endangers men's morals and refines their manners. [ Montesquieu ]
Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
Men are like stone jugs - you may lug them where you like by the ears. [ Johnson ]
Poor men seek meat for their stomach, rich men stomach for their meat. [ Proverb ]
Truly great men are ever most heroic to those most intimate with them. [ John Ruskin ]
To men we can give no help, and they hinder us from helping ourselves. [ Jarno, in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister." ]
Know this, that he that is a friend of himself is a friend to all men. [ Seneca ]
Poor men may think well, but rich men may both think well and do well. [ Proverb ]
How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings. [ Lucretius ]
Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job. [ H. W. Shaw ]
To be instructed in the arts softens the manners and makes men gentle. [ Ovid ]
Rich men without wisdom and learning are but sheep with golden fleeces. [ Solon ]
Nothing at bottom is interesting to the majority of men but themselves. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness. [ Johnson ]
Warn them that are unruly, support the weak, be patient toward all men. [ St. Paul ]
The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any. [ Beaconsfield ]
Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be. [ Goethe ]
Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children. [ R. H. Dana ]
Women have a genius for love; men can only learn the art indifferently. [ De Maistre ]
The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men. [ Bruyere ]
In the ardor of pursuit men soon forget the goal from which they start. [ Schiller ]
The variation of excellence among men is rather in degree than in kind. [ Bancroft ]
She is best who is least spoken of among men, whether for good or evil. [ Pericles ]
Truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of all men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Riches have made mair men covetous than covetousness has made men rich. [ Scotch Proverb ]
If I held all of truth in my hand, I would beware of opening it to men. [ Fontenelle ]
Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly. [ Hazlitt ]
The first men in the world, were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grasier. [ Proverb ]
All men are fools, and with every effort they differ only in the degree. [ Boileau ]
In war, hunting, and love, men for one pleasure a thousand griefs prove. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them. [ Aughey ]
Nobody can think much to bear that, which is the common fate of all men. [ Proverb ]
Men of great intellect live in the world without really belonging to it. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of yourself. [ Pascal ]
No affections and a great brain; these are the men to command the world. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
In seasons of tumult and discord, the worst men have the greatest power. [ Tac ]
There are two sorts of ruins: one is the work of time, the other of men. [ Chateaubriand ]
Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools. [ George Chapman ]
Love for old men is sun on the snow: it dazzles more than it warms them. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
Men are less eager for what they may have, than what they cannot obtain. [ Proverb ]
Men say of women what pleases them; women do with men what pleases them. [ De Segur ]
It is the wit, the policy, of sin to hate those men whom we have abused. [ Sir W. Davenant ]
A downright contradiction is equally mysterious to wise men as to fools. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Most men are like plants: they possess properties which chance discovers. [ De Saint-Real ]
Riches have made more covetous men, than covetousness hath made rich men. [ Proverb ]
Men are unwiser than children; they do not know the hand that feeds them. [ Carlyle ]
Men are seldom blessed with good fortune and good sense at the same time. [ Livy ]
Marriage communicates to women the vices of men, but never their virtues. [ Fourier ]
The greatest hardship of poverty is that it tends to make men ridiculous. [ Juvenal ]
Expect injuries; for men are weak, and thou thyself doest such too often. [ Jean Paul ]
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Rejoicing at men's misfortunes is, in a degree, dancing at their funerals. [ Proverb ]
Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for. [ Landor ]
He that resolves to deal with none but honest men, must leave off dealing. [ Proverb ]
With most men unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another. [ Lichtenberg ]
There never was so great a thought labouring in the breasts of men as now. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. [ Spurgeon ]
Light is coming into the world; men love not darkness; they do love light. [ Carlyle ]
A small drop of ink makes many men honest, who would be rogues without it. [ W. Unsworth ]
Expert men can execute, but learned men are more fit to judge and censure. [ Bacon ]
Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly. [ Swift ]
There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational. [ Goethe ]
Would I were in that country where they break men's arms that talk of work. [ Proverb ]
Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
Men, even when alone, lighten their labors by song, however rude it may be. [ Quintilian ]
Covetous rich men are not so well fed, clothed, or respected, as other men. [ Proverb ]
O, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! [ William Shakespeare ]
Wise men in the world are like timber-trees in a hedge, here and there one. [ Proverb ]
Heaven prepares good men with crosses; but no ill can happen to a good man. [ Ben Jonson ]
In argument with men a woman ever Goes by the worse, whatever be her cause. [ Milton ]
Nothing not a reality ever yet got men to pay bed and board to it for long. [ Carlyle ]
Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it. [ La Bruyere ]
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. [ Beaconsfield ]
The windflower and the violet, they perished long ago.
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook, in autumn beauty stood.
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men.
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland glade and glen. [ Bryant ]
And out of darkness came the hands That reach through nature, moulding men. [ Tennyson ]
The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life. [ Lucan ]
The wit of men compared to that of women is like rouge compared to the rose. [ Saint Foix ]
All great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties. [ Emerson ]
It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
As the Greek said, Many men know how to flatter, few men know bow to praise.
[ Wendell Phillips ]
Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement. [ Beecher ]
Solitude either develops the mental powers, or renders men dull and vicious. [ Victor Hugo ]
Men would not live long in society if they were not the dupes of each other. [ La Bruyere ]
We consecrate a great deal of nonsense, because it was allowed by great men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Good men can more easily see through bad men than the latter can the former. [ Jean Paul Richter ]
Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. [ Ward Beecher ]
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. [ Swift ]
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nothing is more significant of men's character than what they find laughable. [ Goethe ]
Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges. [ T. W. Higginson ]
He is a truly good man who desires always to bear the inspection of good men. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
London bridge was made for wise men to pass over, and for fools to pass under. [ Proverb ]
Women admire strength without affecting it; men delicacy without returning it. [ Jean Paul ]
Nationality is the aggregated individuality of the greatest men of the nation. [ Kossuth ]
Oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer-cakes, and hold-fast is the only dog. [ William Shakespeare ]
We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods. [ Thoreau ]
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. [ Thoreau ]
There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes. [ Hare ]
Fishes live in the sea, as men do land; the great ones eat up the little ones. [ William Shakespeare ]
He that dies without the company of good men puts not himself into a good way. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men. [ W. B. Clulow ]
The favour of great men, and praise of the world, are not much to be relied on. [ Proverb ]
Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good. [ Landor ]
Men shiver when thou art named; nature appalled shakes off her wonted firmness. [ Blair ]
If ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. [ Bible ]
Men are more eloquent than women made; but women are more powerful to persuade. [ Thomas Randolph ]
Wise and good men invented the laws, but fools and the wicked put them upon it. [ Proverb ]
A fool may throw a stone into a well, which a hundred wise men cannot pull out. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men should allow others excellences, to preserve a modest opinion of their own. [ Barrow ]
Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone
To reverence what is ancient, and can plead
A course of long observance for its use.
That even servitude, the worst of ills,
Because delivered down from sire to son, Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing! [ Cowper ]
On this side and on that, men see their friends drop off like leaves in autumn. [ Blair ]
By art and deceit men live half the year, and by deceit and art the other half. [ Proverb ]
When men give up saying what is charming, they cease thinking what is charming. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Men should be what they seem; Or those that be not, would they might seem none! [ William Shakespeare ]
Wise men never sit and wail their woes, but presently prevent the ways to wail. [ William Shakespeare ]
A man among children will be long a child, a child among men will be soon a man. [ Proverb ]
For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human. [ Plutarch ]
I have a very poor opinion of a man who talks to men what women should not hear. [ Richardson ]
Men who flatter women do not know them; men who abuse them know them still less. [ Mme. de Salm ]
Take from men ambition and vanity and you will have neither heroes nor patriots. [ Seneca ]
All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. [ Bible ]
Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste. [ De La Bruyere ]
What use of oaths, of promise, or of test, where men regard no God but interest? [ Waller ]
Let me embrace these sour adversities, for wise men say it is the wisest course. [ Shakespeare ]
There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong conduct appear right. [ Terence ]
All men are equal; it is not birth, but virtue alone, that makes the difference. [ Voltaire ]
Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement. [ Emerson ]
Great men or men of great gifts you will easily find, but symmetrical men never. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Literature has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men. [ Carlyle ]
Shallow men speak of the past, wise men of the present, and fools of the future. [ Mme. du Deffand ]
All men are fools, and notwithstanding all their care, they differ but in degree. [ Boileau ]
True wit is everlasting, like the sun; describing all men, but described by none. [ Buckingham ]
Great men often rejoice at crosses of fortune, just as brave soldiers do at wars. [ Seneca ]
Mercy more becomes a magistrate than the vindictive wrath which men call justice. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Satire lies about men of letters during their life, and eulogy after their death. [ Voltaire ]
Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the sport of men. [ Byron ]
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. [ William Shakespeare ]
Great men are like meteors: they glitter and are consumed to enlighten the world. [ Napoleon I ]
There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal. [ Addison ]
If some men died and others did not, death would indeed be a most mortifying evil. [ Bruyere ]
Men are like money: we must take them for their value, whatever may be the effigy. [ Mme. Necker ]
Instinct harmonizes the interior of animals, as religion does the interior of men. [ Jacobi ]
Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty, and women their happiness. [ Mme. de Rieux ]
Let the misanthrope shun men and abjure; the most are rather lovable than hateful. [ Tupper ]
The opposite of what is noised about concerning men and things is often the truth. [ La Bruyere ]
If a man is unhappy, this must be his own fault; for God made all men to be happy. [ Epictetus ]
Economy is a savings bank, into which men drop pennies, and get dollars in return. [ Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings) ]
O you much partial gods! why gave ye men affections, and not power to govern them? [ Ludovic Barry ]
Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses. [ Bacon ]
Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. [ Holmes ]
Ignorance is a dangerous and spiritual poison, which all men ought warily to shun. [ Gregory ]
Money and man a mutual falsehood show. Men make false money, - money makes men so. [ Aleyn ]
We do not commonly find men of superior sense amongst those of the highest fortune. [ Juvenal ]
Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold. [ Coleridge ]
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Where the hand of tyranny is long we do not see the lips of men open with laughter. [ Saadi ]
Our land is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than of their ideas. [ Bancroft ]
The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the means used to acquire it. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Women have the same desires as men, but do not have the same right to express them. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
There is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distil it out. [ William Shakespeare ]
Women grown bad are worse than men, because the corruption of the best turns worst. [ Proverb ]
We men are but poor, weak souls, after all; women beat us out and out in fortitude. [ Charles Buxton ]
In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men. [ Plautus ]
Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity. [ Burke ]
There are but three classes of men: the retrograde, the stationary, the progressive. [ Lavater ]
To govern men, you must either excel them in their accomplishments, or despise them. [ Beaconsfield ]
Though all men were made of one metal, yet they were not cast all in the same mould. [ Proverb ]
The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men. [ Auerbach ]
Women go further in love than most men, but men go further in friendship than women. [ La Bruyere ]
Women, like men, may be persuaded to confess their faults; but their follies, never. [ Alfred de Musset ]
Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much. [ Landor ]
Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law. [ Milton ]
Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures. [ Cicero ]
Evil men understand not judgment, but they that seek the Lord understand all things. [ Bible ]
Men sunk in the greatest darkness imaginable retain some sense and awe of the Deity. [ Tillotson ]
Men do not go out to meet misfortune as we do. They learn it; and we - we divine it. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
The weakness of woman gives to some men a victory that their merit would never gain.
The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children. [ Hamerton ]
Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature. [ Addison ]
Few men are much worth loving in whom there is not something well worth laughing at. [ Hair ]
Nature does not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. [ Carlyle ]
What fate imposes, men must needs abide; it boots not to resist both wind find tide. [ Shakespeare ]
Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way. [ Rousseau ]
Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty. [ Burke ]
An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men. [ John Ruskin ]
I like people to be saints; but I want them to be first and superlatively honest men. [ Madame Swetchine ]
There is work on God's wide earth for all men that he has made with hands and hearts. [ Carlyle ]
All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. [ Socrates ]
Men say more evil of women than they think: it is the contrary with women toward men. [ S. Dubay ]
In one thing men of all ages are alike; they have believed obstinately in themselves. [ Jacobi ]
Strength with men is insensibility, greatness is pride, and calmness is indifference. [ George Sand ]
Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not the things themselves. [ Montaigne ]
There is the seed of all sins - of the vilest and worst of sins - in the best of men. [ Thomas Brooks ]
No sadder proof can be given by man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. [ Carlyle ]
If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use. [ Addison ]
I am no herald to inquire of men's pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Commerce is a game of skill, which every one cannot play, which few men can play well. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Wise men, like wine, are best when old; pretty women, like bread, are best when young. [ Haliburton ]
The weaknesses of women have been given them by nature to exercise the virtues of men. [ Mme. Necker ]
Quacks pretend to cure other men's disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own. [ Cicero ]
For what are men who grasp at praise sublime, but bubbles on the rapid stream of time? [ Young ]
Permanence, persistence, is the first condition of all fruitfulness in the ways of men. [ Carlyle ]
Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men. [ Horace Mann ]
I intend no modification of my oftexpressed wish that all men everywhere could be free. [ Abraham Lincoln ]
Women deceived by men want to marry them: it is a kind of revenge as good as any other. [ Beaumanoir ]
The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. [ Goethe ]
What pretty things men will make for money, quoth the old woman, when she saw a monkey. [ Proverb ]
Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit; but God to man doth speak in solitude. [ John Stuart Blackie ]
We bachelors laugh and show our teeth, but you married* men laugh until your heart ache. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. [ Carlyle ]
Hence it is that old men do plant young trees, the fruit whereof another age shall take. [ Sir J. Davies ]
Very few men understand the true significance of contentment; women alone illustrate it. [ Mme. Deluzy ]
If men wish to be held in esteem, they must associate with those only who are estimable. [ Bruyere ]
Men are prostrated by misfortune; women bend, but do not break, and martyr-like live on. [ Anna Cora Mowatt ]
Extremes are vicious, and proceed from men; compensation is just, and proceeds from God. [ Bruyere ]
That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in; and the best of me is diligence. [ William Shakespeare ]
A little philosophy leads men to despise learning; a great deal leads them to esteem it. [ Chamfort ]
The generality of men have, like plants, latent properties, which chance brings to light. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time. [ Not traceable ]
Women do not often have it in their power to give like men, but they forgive like Heaven. [ Mme. Necker ]
Leisure for men of business, and business for men of leisure, would cure many complaints. [ Mrs. Thrale ]
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners. [ T. B. Macaulay ]
In condemning the vanity of women, men complain of the fire they themselves have kindled. [ Lingrie ]
Men drop so fast, ere life's mid stage we tread, Few know so many friends alive, as dead. [ Young ]
We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. [ Emerson ]
Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us. [ Thomas Paine ]
Extremes of fortune are true wisdom's test, and he's of men most wise who bears them best. [ Cumberland ]
When men once reach their autumn, sickly joys fall off apace, as yellow leaves from trees. [ Young ]
God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. [ Balzac ]
In running their race, men of birth look back too much, which is the mark of a bad runner. [ Bacon ]
All men are like in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ. [ Bovee ]
Old men who preserve the desires of youth lose in consideration what they gain in ridicule. [ Napoleon I ]
Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die. [ De La Bruyere ]
Dangers are light, if they seem light; and more dangers have deceived men than forced them. [ Bacon ]
With the majority of men unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another thing. [ Lichtenberg ]
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal. [ Froude ]
A hydra advances which will soon devour all the men of sentiment: this hydra is the cipher. [ O. Firmez ]
It is not decided that women love more than men, but is indisputable that they love better. [ Sanial-Dubay ]
Women often deceive to conceal what they feel; men to simulate what they do not feel - love. [ E. Legouve ]
There are very many things that men, when their cloaks have got holes in them, dare not say. [ Juv ]
Books are men of higher stature, and the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear. [ Mrs. Browning ]
Men call physicians only when they suffer; women, when they are merely afflicted with ennui. [ Mme. de Genlis ]
Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science. [ Thoreau ]
He smiled as men smile when they will not speak, because of something bitter in the thought. [ Mrs. Browning ]
To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair. [ Froude ]
Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter. [ Horace Mann ]
Promises retain men better than services. For them, hope is a chain, and gratitude a thread. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children. [ William Penn ]
Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times. [ Ben Jonson ]
Satire lies respecting literary men during their life, and eulogy does so after their death. [ Voltaire ]
Old men are always jealous: they are like the greedy child who wants the cake it can not eat. [ A. Ricard ]
In my domain there have been learned men, but outside their breviary they could read nothing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is a sad thing when men have neither wit to speak well nor judgment to hold their tongues. [ La Bruyere ]
It is easier for a woman to defend her virtue against men, than her reputation against women. [ Rochebrune ]
There is a settled friendship, nay, a near relation and similitude, between God and good men. [ Seneca ]
Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance. [ Whately ]
Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear; As seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near. [ Webster ]
The speech of the tongue is best known to men; God best understands the language of the heart. [ Warwick ]
There are more men who have missed opportunities than there are who have lacked opportunities. [ La Beaumelle ]
Pedants are men who would appear to be learned, without the necessary ingredient of knowledge. [ Bancroft ]
It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of. [ Swift ]
Men do not always love those they esteem; women, on the contrary, esteem only those they love. [ S. Dubay ]
There is a greater distance between some men and others, than between some men and the beasts. [ Montaigne ]
Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintances. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
A small number of men and women think for the million; through them the million speak and act. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
A great name is like an eternal epitaph engraved by the admiration of men on the road of time. [ E. Souvestre ]
The hearts of men are their books, events are their tutors, great actions are their eloquence. [ Macaulay ]
Women have much more heart and much more imagination than men; hence, fancy often allures them. [ Lamartine ]
He comes to you with a tale which holds children from play and old men from the chimney-corner. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Wine and other luxuries have a tendency to enervate the mind and make men less brave in battle. [ Caesar ]
Men always say more evil of women than there really is; and there is always more than is known. [ Mezerai ]
For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools. [ Thomas Hobbes ]
How much easier it is to be generous than just! Men are sometimes bountiful who are not honest. [ Junius ]
Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The soul of a man can by no agency, of men or of devils, be lost and ruined but by his own only. [ Carlyle ]
The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less upon their dispositions than their fortunes. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men. [ Schiller ]
Love of men cannot be bought by cash payment; and without love men cannot endure to be together. [ Carlyle ]
Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy. [ Vauvenargues ]
There will be mistakes in divinity while men preach, and errors in governments while men govern. [ Sir Dudley Carlton ]
We ought not to judge of men's merits by their qualifications, but by the use they make of them. [ Charron ]
Men declare their love before they feel it; women confess theirs only after they have proved it. [ Latena ]
There are some men who are fortune's favorites, and who, like cats, light forever on their legs. [ Colton ]
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law of the world, and are afraid of the world's tongue. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Poetry is a spirit, not disembodied, but in the flesh, so as to affect the senses of living men. [ Stedman ]
My name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next age. [ Bacon ]
Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death; only little men do that. [ John Ruskin ]
Still thou knowest that in the ardor of pursuit men lose sight of the goal from which they start. [ Schiller ]
Nevertheless, even envy, however unwilling, will have to admit that I have lived among great men. [ Horace ]
The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune. [ Wm. Penn ]
There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humor, and others only when they are sad. [ Joubert ]
Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Vanity, shame, and, above all, temperament, often make the valor of men, and the virtue of women. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Great patriots must be men of great excellence; this alone can secure to them lasting admiration. [ H. Giles ]
Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment. [ L'Estrange ]
To know the true opinions of men, one ought to pay more respect to their actions than their words. [ Descartes ]
God save the fools, and don't let them run out; for, without them, wise men couldn't get a living. [ Amer. Proverb ]
The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come. [ Dante ]
Men of wit. learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays. [ Swift ]
It is the common wonder of all men how among so many millions of faces there should be none alike. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Glory drags all men along, low as well as high, bound captive at the wheels of her glittering car. [ Horace ]
The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell but the mere pleasure of God. [ Jonathan Edwards ]
Great men essay enterprises because they think them great, and fools because they think them easy. [ Vauvenargues ]
There are some men who are fortune's favorites, and who, like cats, light forever upon their feet. [ Colton ]
When I was happy I thought I knew men, but it was fated that I should know them in misfortune only. [ Napoleon ]
Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk. [ Montesquieu ]
Many men and many women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not. [ Chamfort ]
Women complain of the lack of virtue in men, and do not esteem those who are too strictly virtuous. [ Blondel ]
Women are happier in the love they inspire than in that which they feel: men are just the contrary. [ Beauchene ]
I will adhere to the counsels of good men, although misfortune and death should be the consequence. [ Cicero ]
Though men can cover crimes with bold, stern looks, poor women's faces are their own faults' books. [ William Shakespeare ]
Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them; for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes. [ Juvenal ]
Men of limited intelligence generally condemn everything that is above their power of understanding. [ La Roche ]
How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness. [ B. R. Haydon ]
Nothing so effectively baffles the schemes of evil men so much as the calm composure of great souls. [ Mirabeau ]
Men live best upon small means. Nature has provided for all, if they only knew how to use her gifts. [ Claudianus ]
Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a key to their hearts, as to their garden. [ Shenstone ]
There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so. [ Colton ]
Men's fame is like their hair, which grows after they are dead, and with just as little use to them. [ George Villiers ]
Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word: Wait! [ Longfellow ]
You cannot save men from death but by facing it for them, nor from sin but by resisting it for them. [ John Ruskin ]
It will be found that they are the weakest winded and the hardest hearted men that most love change. [ Ruskin ]
Nations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve heaven when they enjoy it. [ Richter ]
A woman can not guarantee her heart, even though her husband be the greatest and most perfect of men. [ George Sand ]
Miserable men commiserate not themselves; bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their own bowels. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
A nation does wisely, if not well, in starving her men of genius. Fatten them, and they are done for. [ Charles Buxton ]
The belfries of all Christendom now roll along the unbroken song of peace on earth, good will to men! [ Longfellow ]
There are some kinds of men who cannot pass their time alone; they are the flails of occupied people. [ M. de Bonald ]
I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own. [ Montaigne ]
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education. [ Harriet Martineau ]
When men are friends there is no need of justice; but when they are just, they still need friendship. [ Aristotle ]
Men may say of marriage and women what they please: they will renounce neither the one nor the other.
Men can be estimated by those who know them not, only as they are represented by those who know them. [ Johnson ]
Sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. [ Carlyle ]
Men who have great riches and little culture rush into business, because they are weary of themselves. [ Horace Greeley ]
The less one sees and knows men, the higher one esteems them; for experience teaches their real value. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
Some men have a Sunday soul, which they screw on in due time, and take off again every Monday morning. [ Kobert Hall ]
A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man, and men are the particles of which it is composed. [ J. G. Holland ]
They that hold the greatest farms pay the least rent (applied to rich men that are unthankful to God). [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing. [ Alexander Pope ]
Those who have few things to attend to are great babblers; for the less men think, the more they talk. [ Montesquieu ]
There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it. [ Landor ]
Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them. [ Duncan ]
Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. [ Chesterfield ]
White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments. [ Theophile Gautier ]
Dishonest men conceal their faults from themselves as well as others; honest men know and confess them. [ Rochefoucauld ]
A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones. [ Chesterfield ]
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. [ Coleridge ]
Experience to most men is like the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. [ Coleridge ]
It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon man as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
The devil must be very powerful, since the sacrifice of a god for men has not rendered them any better. [ Piron ]
Men very rarely put off the trappings of pride till they who are about them put on their winding-sheet. [ Clarendon ]
Commonsense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities. [ W. R. Alger ]
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. [ Carlyle ]
Men in general do not live as if they looked to die; and therefore do not die as if they looked to live. [ Manton ]
Let men laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in. [ Theodore Parker ]
All the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, and in all of them a woman is only a weaker man. [ Plato ]
Greece, so much praised for her wisdom, never produced but seven wise men: judge of the number of fools! [ Grecourt ]
An army or a parliament is a collection of men, a dictionary, or nomenclature, is a collection of words. [ I. Watts ]
Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth without plan, and are ever at the end of their line. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Great men should think of opportunity and not of time. Time is the excuse of feeble and puzzled spirits. [ Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) ]
There are in the world circumstances which give us for masters men of whom we would not make our valets. [ Mme. Roland ]
I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadow-side of a good. [ George MacDonald ]
Men are so necessarily fools that it would be being a fool in a higher strain of folly, not to be a fool. [ Pascal ]
Men and brethren, a simple trust in God is the most essential ingredient in moral sublimity of character. [ Richard Fuller ]
We pick our own sorrows out of the joys of other men, and from their sorrows likewise we derive our joys. [ Owen Feltham ]
Men have made of Fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order to be made responsible for all their blunders. [ Mme. de Stael ]
I am amazed how men can call her blind, when, by the company she keeps, she seems so very discriminating. [ Goldsmith ]
At a ball, men are the timid sex, and also the feebler sex; for they are always the first to be fatigued. [ A. Karr ]
It is motive alone that gives real value to the actions of men, and disinterestedness puts the cap to it. [ Bruyere ]
Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say. [ Colton ]
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams. [ Emerson ]
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability. [ Burke ]
Experience teaches us again and again that there is nothing men have less command over than their tongues. [ Spinoza ]
Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining and commanding among men. [ Carlyle ]
Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk. [ Cicero ]
Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. [ St. John ]
Experience is the common schoolhouse of fools and ill men. Men of wit and honesty be otherwise instructed. [ Erasmus ]
The words of men are like the leaves of trees; when they are too many they hinder the growth of the fruit. [ Steiger ]
It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another. [ William Shakespeare ]
Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own. [ Terence ]
A man philosophizes better than a woman on the human heart, but she reads the hearts of men better than he. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter. [ Carlyle ]
Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting for ever in one direction. [ Lowell ]
If, of all vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men. [ Helvetius ]
The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinions of its young men under five-and-twenty. [ Goethe ]
By nothing do men more show what they are than by their appreciation of what is and what is not ridiculous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The error of certain women is to imagine that, to acquire distinction, they must imitate the manners of men. [ J. de Maistre ]
Men leave their riches either to their kindred or their friends, and moderate portions prosper best in both. [ Bacon ]
Night bringeth sleep, and spreadeth itself over the crowds of weary men, and giveth rest to the whole earth. [ Apollonius Rhodius ]
The feather whence the pen was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, dropped from an angel's wing. [ Wordsworth ]
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The grave - dread thing! - men shiver when thou art named; Nature, appalled, shakes off her wonted firmness. [ Blair ]
Most nations, as well as men, are impressible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old. [ Rousseau ]
In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. [ Channing ]
A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works as by his patience. [ Horace Bushnell ]
Favourable chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. [ George Eliot ]
I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame. [ A. Smith ]
Arms, ye men, bring me arms! their last day summons the vanquished. We shall never all die unavenged this day. [ Virgil ]
Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; (for men) inseparable, yet not hostile, only opposed. [ Carlyle ]
Lord, what music hast thou provided for thy saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth! [ Izaak Walton ]
Adversity tries men, and virtue strives for glory through adverse circumstances, undeterred by hard obstacles. [ Silius Italicus ]
Women are right to crave beauty at any price, since beauty is the only merit that men do not contest with them. [ A. Dupuy ]
Men have a solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it. [ Johnson ]
What is past is past. There is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
If women are naturally more superstitious than men, it is because they are more sensitive and less enlightened. [ Beauchene ]
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel. [ Hazlitt ]
Every day is a rampart breach which many men are storming; fall in it who may, no pile is forming of the slain. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Ridicule is a weak weapon when levelled at a strong mind; but common men are cowards, and dread an empty laugh. [ Tupper ]
In all companies there are more fools than wise men; and the greater number always get the better of the wiser. [ Rabelais ]
Imparting knowledge, is only lighting other men's candle at our lamp, without depriving ourselves of any flame. [ Jane Porter ]
Men must have righteous principles in the first place, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions. [ Luther ]
The age we live in is the true age of gold; by gold men attain to the highest honour, and win even love itself. [ Ovid ]
Can there be any greater folly than the respect you pay to men collectively when you despise them individually? [ Cicero ]
Truth shines with its own light; it is not by the flames of funeral piles that the minds of men are illuminated. [ Belisarius ]
He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men will know how things are. [ Colton ]
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude. [ Voltaire ]
Ah! when shall all men's good be each man's rule, and universal peace lie like a shaft of light across the land? [ Tennyson ]
The glory of a people and of an age is always the work of a small number of great men, and disappears with them. [ Baron de Grimm ]
Marriage has its unknown great men, as war has its Napoleons, poetry its Cheniers, and philosophy its Descartes. [ Balzac ]
Men believe that their reason governs their words; but it often happens the words have power to react on reason. [ Bacon ]
The years write their records on men's hearts as they do on trees: inner circles of growth which no eye can see. [ Saxe Holm ]
The history of the thoughts of men, curious on account of their infinite variety, is also sometimes instructive. [ Fontanelle ]
Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites. [ Disraeli ]
Men are guided less by conscience than by glory: and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience. [ Henry Home ]
I have often thought that the nature of women was inferior to that of men in general, but superior in particular. [ Greville ]
Because all men are apt to flatter themselves, to entertain the addition of other men's praises is most perilous. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel, that when we find one who is only weak, we are too happy. [ Voltaire ]
Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found. [ Auerbach ]
Out, you impostors, quack-salving, cheating mountebanks! Your skill is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill. [ Massinger ]
The best government is not that which renders men the happiest, but that which renders the greatest number happy. [ Charles P. Duclos ]
Some old men like to give good precepts to console themselves for their inability no longer to give bad examples. [ A. Dupuy ]
Life was never a May-game for men; not play at all, but hard work, that makes the sinews sore and the heart sore. [ Carlyle ]
It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience. [ Horace Bushnell ]
Women suffer more from disappointment than men, because they have more of faith and are naturally more credulous. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
All men are married women's property; that is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
All men are fools: to escape seeing one, one would be compelled to shut himself in his room, and break his mirror. [ De Sade ]
We should have all our communications with men as in the presence of God; and with God, as in the presence of men. [ Colton ]
It is necessary to repent for years in order to efface a fault in the eyes of men; a single tear suffices with God. [ Chateaubriand ]
Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunders. [ Mme. de Stael ]
Wit, like money, bears an extra value when rung down immediately it is wanted. Men pay severely who require credit. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. [ Carlyle ]
There are peculiar ways in men, which discover what they are, through the most subtle feints and closest disguises. [ La Bruyere ]
Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves; and perhaps that is the reason of it. [ William Penn ]
The purer the golden vessel the more readily is it bent; the higher worth of women is sooner lost than that of men. [ Jean Paul ]
The great men of the earth are but the markingstones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion. [ Mazzini ]
I too must attempt a way by which I may raise myself above the ground, and soar triumphant through the lips of men. [ Virgil ]
In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. [ Francis Bacon ]
Learning the liberal arts and sciences thoroughly, softens men's manners, and prevents their being a pack of brutes. [ Ovid ]
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great. [ Bulwer ]
It is strange that all great men should have some little grain of madness mingled with whatever genius they possess. [ Moliere ]
There are men who pride themselves on their insensibility to love: it is like boasting of having been always stupid. [ S. de Castres ]
The temple of fame stands upon the grave; the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of dead men. [ Hazlitt ]
Covetous men need money least, yet they most affect it; but prodigals, who need it most have the least regard for it. [ Alexander Wilson ]
The love of flattery in most men proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary. [ Swift ]
A beautiful object doth so much attract the sight of all men, that it is in no man's power not to be pleased with it. [ Clarendon ]
By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men. [ Cicero ]
In matters of fact, they say there is some credit to be given to the testimony of men, but not in matters of judgment. [ Hooker ]
Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies. [ Goethe ]
Women are pictures, men are problems: if you want to know what a woman really means, look at her, don't listen to her. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men. [ Langford ]
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers. [ Hare ]
We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness. [ Hare ]
Men are sometimes accused of pride, merely because their accusers would be proud themselves were they in their places. [ Shenstone ]
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise. [ Emerson ]
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration. [ Macchiavelli ]
There are men whose tongues are more eloquent than those of women, but no man possesses the eloquence of a woman's eye. [ C. Weber ]
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram. [ Whipple ]
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as the blazing meteor when it descends to the earth is only a stone. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
If eminent men whose history has been written could return to life, how they would laugh at what has been said of them. [ De Finod ]
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humour to one from their reason. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Of all the authorities to which men can be called to submit, the wisdom of our ancestors is the most whimsically absurd. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. [ Hare ]
That two men may be real friends, they must have opposite opinions, similar principles, and different loves and hatreds. [ Chateaubriand ]
In all our reasonings concerning men, we must lay it down as a maxim that the greater part are moulded by circumstances. [ Robert Hall ]
There are some vile and contemptible men who, allowing themselves to be conquered by misfortune, seek a refuge in death. [ Agathon ]
Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company. [ George Washington ]
By virtue, integrity, perseverance and true modesty it is possible for all men to win the esteem of their fellow beings. [ C. N. Douglas ]
Some men are so covetous, as if they were to live forever; and others so profuse, as if they were to die the next moment. [ Aristotle ]
There are men the eloquence of whose tongues surpasses that of women, but no man possesses the eloquence of women's eyes. [ Weber ]
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held. [ Matthew Arnold ]
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity, is to continue in a state of childhood all our days. [ Plutarch ]
To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speaks the truth. [ Hazlitt ]
Of some calamity we can have no relief but from God alone; and what would men do, in such a case, if it were not for God? [ Tillotson ]
The greater number of nations, as of men, are only impressible in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old. [ Rousseau ]
Men are atheistical because they are first vicious, and question the truth of Christianity because they bane the practice. [ South ]
Time is the king of men; he is both their parent, and he is their grave, and gives them what he will, not what they crave. [ William Shakespeare ]
Some men will believe nothing but what they can comprehend; and there are but few things that such are able to comprehend. [ St. Evremond ]
Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. [ Burke ]
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. [ Richelieu ]
In life, we shall find many men that are great, and some men that are good, but very few men that are both great and good. [ Colton ]
The philosophy of princes is to dive into the secrets of men, leaving the secrets of nature to those that have spare time. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Men possessing minds which are morose, solemn, and inflexible enjoy generally a greater share of dignity than of happiness. [ Bacon ]
Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not. [ Goethe ]
Men live best upon a little; Nature has given to all the privilege of being happy, if they but knew how to use their gifts. [ Claudianus ]
Any style is good if you have something you have a call to say, and men ought to hear; and no style is good if you haven't. [ Thomas Hughes, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. [ Hawthorne ]
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. [ Dickens ]
To think and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. [ Charles Lamb ]
The images of men's wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the worry of time and capable of perpetual renovation. [ Bacon ]
Repentance is for pale faces; they killed Christ, the good man. If Christ had come to red men, we would not have killed him. [ Red Jacket ]
If there were a people of gods, they would govern themselves democratically: so perfect a government is not suitable to men. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
To nil married men be this caution, which they should duly tender as their life: Neither to doat too much, nor doubt a wife. [ Massinger ]
Love's true function in the world is as the regenerator and restorer of social life, the reconciler and uniter of living men. [ Ed ]
Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice; whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born. [ Shenstone ]
In comparing men and books, one must always remember this important distinction, that one can put the books down at any time. [ N. P. Willis ]
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Great poets try to describe what all men see and to express what all men feel; if they cannot describe it, they let it alone. [ John Ruskin ]
A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies: but sensible men will pay no attention to them. [ Froude ]
I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm. [ William Shakespeare ]
The punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Women dress less to be clothed than to be adorned. When alone before their mirrors, they think more of men than of themselves. [ Rochebrune ]
There is only one cure for public distress, and that is public education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. [ John Ruskin ]
I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine: Every man for himself and God for us all. [ Cervantes ]
Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Many men and women spend their lives in unsuccessful attempts to spin the flax God sends them upon a wheel they can never use. [ J. G. Holland ]
Beauty attracts us men, but if, like an armed magnet it is pointed with gold or silver beside, it attracts with tenfold power. [ Richter ]
Few things are more unpleasant than the transaction of business with men who are above knowing or caring what they have to do. [ Johnson ]
Were we as eloquent as angels, we would please some men, some women, and some children much more by listening than by talking. [ Colton ]
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools. [ Burke ]
Few things are impracticable in themselves: and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail of success. [ Rochefoucauld ]
There is a wide difference between the knowledge of men and the knowledge of man. To know man, it suffices to study one's self. [ Duclos ]
For there is no air that men so greedily draw in, that diffuses itself so soon, and that penetrates so deep as that of license. [ Montaigne ]
Men possessing minds which are morose, solemn, and inflexible, enjoy, in general, a greater share of dignity than of happiness. [ Bacon ]
It does not take twenty years for men to change their opinions of things which had seemed to them the truest, and most certain. [ La Bruyere ]
Knowledge is not a shop for profit or sale, but a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of men's estate. [ Bacon ]
Blessed be mirthfulness! It is one of the renovators of the world. Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them. [ Swift ]
Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness. [ Pascal ]
Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasures takes joy, even as though 'twere his own. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Some are brave men one day and cowards another, as great captains have often told me, from their own experience and observation. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Superstition is certainly not the characteristic of this age. Yet some men are bigoted in politics who are infidels in religion. [ Junius ]
Never did poesy appear so full of heaven to me as when I saw how it pierced through pride and fear to the lives of coarsest men. [ Lowell ]
When worthy men fall out, only one of them may be faulty at the first; but if strife continue long, commonly both become guilty. [ Fuller ]
There are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will not reduce to an acknowledgment of the Divine power. [ Plato ]
My advice is to consult the lives of other men as we would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for our own imitation. [ Terence ]
Employ your time in improving yourselves by other men's documents: so shall you come easily by what others have labored hard for. [ Socrates ]
Women love men for their defects; if men have enough of them, women will forgive them everything, even their gigantic intellects. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives. [ Burke ]
A name is a kind of face whereby one is known; wherefore taking a false name is a kind of visard whereby men disguise themselves. [ Thomas Fuller ]
Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences. [ Horace ]
Men are so accustomed to lie, that one can not take too many precautions before trusting them - if they are to be trusted at all. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
It has always struck me that there is a far greater distinction between man and man than between many men and most other animals. [ Basil Hall ]
What man in his right mind would conspire his own hurt? Men are beside themselves when they transgress against their convictions. [ William Penn ]
There are men who dwell on the defects of their enemies. I always have regard to the merits of mine, and derive profit therefrom. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature. [ Quintilian ]
The little and short sayings of nice and excellent men are of great value, like the dust of gold, or the least sparks of diamonds. [ Tillotson ]
The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease. [ Addison ]
I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of today are wont to be fairer and truer in tomorrow's memory. [ Thoreau ]
Prudent and active men, who know their strength and use it with limit and circumspection, alone go far in the affairs of the world. [ Goethe ]
A wise man in the company of those who are ignorant has been compared by the sages to a beautiful girl in the company of blind men. [ Saadi ]
Pride, in some particular disguise or other - often a secret to be proud himself - is the most ordinary spring of action among men. [ Steele ]
The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without. [ Phillips Brooks ]
Men of strong affections are jealous of their own genius. They fear lest they should be loved for a quality, and not for themselves. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; and beasts, by nature. [ Cicero ]
A look of intelligence in men is what regularity of features is in women; it is a style of beauty to which the most vain may aspire. [ La Bruyere ]
He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body. [ Colton ]
There is nothing which so poisons princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain credit and favor with them. [ Montaigne ]
I knew a wise man who had it for a by-word when he saw men hasten to a conclusion: Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.
[ Bacon ]
Carried away by the irresistible influence which is always exercised over men's minds by a bold resolution in critical circumstances. [ Guizot ]
There are braying men in the world, as well as braying asses; for what is loud and senseless talking any other than a way of braying? [ Sir Roger L'Estrange ]
Great men are the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain. [ Carlyle ]
The wine-shops breed, in physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution. [ Charles Dickens ]
It is strange that thought should depend upon the stomach, and still that men with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers. [ Voltaire ]
The tree of the world hath its poisons, but beareth two fruits of exquisite flavor, the nectar of poetry and the society of noble men. [ Hitopadesa ]
Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use. [ Bailey ]
The prejudices of men emanate from the mind, and may be overcome; the prejudices of women emanate from the heart, and are impregnable.
Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair. [ Fielding ]
Sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men. [ Matthew Arnold ]
In goodness, rich men should transcend the poor, as clouds the earth; raised by the comfort of the sun to water dry and barren grounds. [ Tourneur ]
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters. [ Burke ]
As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal. [ Steele ]
The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth. [ Theodore Parker ]
Laws are the very bulwarks of liberty. They define every man's rights, and stand between and defend the individual liberties of all men. [ Holland ]
From a common custom of swearing men easily slide into perjury; therefore, if thou wouldst not be perjured, do not use thyself to swear. [ Hierocles ]
Where men or nations have broken down, it will almost invariably be found that neglect of little things was the rock on which they split. [ Smiles ]
Mr. Bettenham said that virtuous men were like some herbs and spices, that give not out their sweet smell till they be broken or crushed. [ Bacon ]
Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie; to be laid in the balance they are altogether lighter than vanity. [ Bible ]
Associate with men of judgment, for judgment is found in conversation, and we make another man's judgment ours by frequenting his company. [ Thomas Fuller ]
The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty. [ Montaigne ]
Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Some men are counted wise from the cunning manner in which they hide their ignorance. In what little they do know such men play the pedant. [ A. Ricard ]
A woman who has not seen her lover for the whole day considers that day lost for her: the tenderest of men considers it only lost for love. [ Mme. de Salm ]
Let men of all ranks, whether they are successful or unsuccessful, whether they triumph or not - let them do their duty, and rest satisfied. [ Plato ]
We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand; and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies. [ Goethe ]
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. [ Bacon ]
The writer of a book, is not he a preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? [ Carlyle ]
Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of Necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men. [ Socrates ]
How different the fate of men who commit the same crimes! For the same villany one man goes to the gallows, and another is raised to a throne.
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls. [ Lowell ]
Men of real merit, and whose noble and glorious deeds we are ready to acknowledge, are yet not to be endured when they vaunt their own actions. [ Aeschines ]
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been blasted with excess of light.
[ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Without great men, great crowds of people in a nation are disgusting; like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas - the more, the worse. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The god, O men, seems to me to be really wise; and by his oracle to mean this, that the wisdom of this world is foolishness and of none effect. [ Plato ]
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter. [ Lord Chesterfield ]
The generality of men are wholly governed by names in matters of good and evil, so far as the qualities relate to and affect the actions of men. [ South ]
Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage. [ Johnson ]
To be fossilized is to be stagnant, unprogressive, dead, frozen into a solid. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position. [ Plutarch ]
When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none; and then they endeavor to persuade themselves so. [ Tillotson ]
Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do. [ Bovee ]
Gruel men are the greatest lovers of mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in others, not in themselves. [ Colton ]
The pride of the heart is the attribute of honest men; pride of manners is that of fools; the pride of birth and rank is often the pride of dupes. [ Duclos ]
Whatever difference there may appear to be in men's fortunes, there is still a certain compensation of good and ill in all, that makes them equal. [ Charron ]
Men commonly think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and imbibed opinions; but generally act according to custom. [ Bacon ]
Men will always act according to their passions. Therefore the best government is that which inspires the nobler passions and destroys the meaner. [ Jacobi ]
We show wisdom by a decent conformity to social etiquette: it is excess of neatness or display that creates dandyism in men, and coquetry in women. [ Robert Adam ]
There is among men such intense affectation that they often boast of defects which they have not, more willingly than of qualities which they have. [ George Sand ]
To the disgrace of men it is seen that there are women both more wise to judge what evil is expected, and more constant to bear it when it happens. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else. [ Carlyle ]
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have the world proclaimeth, and what faults they commit the earth covereth. [ Quarles ]
To know what is useful and what useless, and to be skilful to provide the one and wise to scorn the other, is the first need for all industrious men. [ John Ruskin ]
There are forty men of wit for one of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of ready change. [ Unknown ]
Great minds comprehend more in a word, a look, a pressure of the hand, than ordinary men in long conversations, or the most elaborate correspondence. [ Lavater ]
A babe in a house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love, a resting-place for innocence on earth, a link between angels and men. [ Tupper ]
It is a general rule, one at least to which I know no exceptions, that all superior men inherit the elements of their superiority from their mothers. [ Michelet ]
If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious. If women knew what men think, they would be twenty times more coquettish. [ A. Karr ]
Let men say, we be men of good government; being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. [ William Shakespeare ]
There is but one class of men to be trembled at, and that is the stupid class, the class that cannot see; who, alas! are mainly they that will not see. [ Carlyle ]
Great minds seek to labour for eternity. All other men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. [ Lamb ]
Libraries are the wardrobes of our literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. [ J. Dyer ]
Perseverance and tact are the two great qualities most valuable for all men who would mount, but especially for those who have to step out of the crowd. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Exact justice is commonly more merciful in the long run than pity, for it tends to foster in men those stronger qualities which make them good citizens. [ Lowell ]
No woman, plain or pretty, has any commonsense at all. Common-sense is the privilege of our sex and we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world. [ Pascal ]
Heroes are men who set out to be demi-gods in their own eyes, and who end by being so at certain moments by dint of despising and combating all humanity. [ George Sand ]
Men are seldom underrated; the mercury in a man finds its true level in the eyes of the world just as certainly as it does in the glass of a thermometer. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare. [ Coleridge ]
The woman's cause is man's. They rise or sink together; dwarfed or godlike, bond or free; if she be small, slight-natured, miserable, how shall men grow? [ Tennyson ]
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. [ Emerson ]
The science of women, as that of men, must be limited according to their powers: the difference of their characters ought to limit that of their studies. [ Fenelon ]
There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed; but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals. [ Colton ]
What is the disposition which makes men rejoice in good bargains? There are few people who will not be benefited by pondering over the morals of shopping. [ Beecher ]
Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual. [ Fontenelle ]
There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they are made to breathe. [ Holmes ]
That plenty should produce either Covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches. [ William Penn ]
The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it. [ Burke ]
Men of humour are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare. [ Coleridge ]
The faults of the superior man are like the eclipses of the sun and moon. He has his faults, and all men see them; he changes, and all men look up to him. [ Confucius ]
The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward. [ Horace Mann ]
Truth, like the juice of a poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in its excess. [ Landor ]
God takes men's hearty desires and will, instead of the deed, where they have not power to fulfill it; but he never took the bare deed instead of the will. [ Richard Baxter ]
A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious. [ Addison ]
Too many instances there are of daring men, who by presuming to sound the deep things of religion, have cavilled and argued themselves out of all religion. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting. [ John Ruskin ]
It is a law of nature that fainthearted men should be the fruit of luxurious countries, for we never find that the same soil produces delicacies and heroes. [ Herodotus ]
Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good. [ Schiller ]
Our favorites are few: since only what rises from the heart reaches it, being caught and carried on the tongues of men wheresoever love and letters journey. [ Alcott ]
Men of genius are often considered superstitious, but the fact is, the fineness of their nerve renders them more alive to the supernatural than ordinary men. [ B. R. Haydon ]
Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because it is an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him. [ Selden ]
The men who convey and those who listen to calumnies should, if I could have my way, all hang, the talebearers by their tongues, the listeners by their ears. [ Plautus ]
These men (chronic fault-finders) should consider that it is their envy which deforms everything, and that the ugliness is not in the object, but in the eye. [ Steele ]
Some things will not bear much zeal; and the more earnest we are about them, the less we recommend ourselves to the approbation of sober and considerate men. [ Tillotson ]
I believe one reason why women are generally so much more cheerful than men is because they can work with the needle, and so endlessly vary their employment. [ Sydney Smith ]
Men of all ages have the same inclinations, over which reason exercises no control. Thus, wherever men are found, there are follies, ay, and the same follies. [ La Fontaine ]
The more enlarged is our own mind, the greater number we discover of men of originality. Your commonplace people see no difference between one man and another. [ Pascal ]
Mountains never shake hands.
Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]
Government is the greatest combination of forces known to human society. It can command more men and raise more money than any and all other agencies combined. [ D. D. Field ]
Power above powers! O heavenly eloquence! that, with the strong reign of commanding words, dost manage, guide and master the high eminence of men's affections! [ Daniel ]
The best men are not those who have waited for chances, but who have taken them, besieged the chance, conquered the chance, and made the chance their servitor. [ Chapin ]
Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men.... Everybody knows that Government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs. [ Wendell Phillips ]
There are no accidents so unfortunate from which skillful men will not draw some advantage, nor so fortunate that foolish men will not turn them to their hurt. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself indeed in every finite form, but compromised by none. [ Henry James ]
The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past. [ Ruskin ]
The friendship of some men is like the love of some women; it is variable and capricious, inconstant and uncertain, hard to win, and when won, not worth having. [ Acton ]
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into this world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. [ Richard Rumbold ]
Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. [ Carlyle ]
You know that in everything women write there are always a thousand faults of grammar, but, with your permission, a harmony which is rare in the writings of men. [ Mme. de Maintenon ]
"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work," is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realised? [ Carlyle ]
Adverse fortune seldom spares men of the noblest virtues. No one can with safety expose himself often to dangers. The man who has often escaped is at last caught. [ Seneca ]
That is, in a great degree, true of all men, which was said of the Athenians, that they were like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one. [ Whately ]
When flowers are full of heaven-descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full. [ Beecher ]
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare. [ F. H. Hedge ]
There must be work done by the arms, or none of us would live; and work done by the brains, or the life would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. [ John Ruskin ]
It is generally admitted, and very frequently proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which men possess, are derived from their mothers. [ T. Hook ]
The lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The art of putting the right men in the right places is first in the science of government; but, that of finding places for the discontented is the most difficult. [ Talleyrand ]
The head learns new things, but the heart forevermore practices old experiences. Therefore our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. [ Coleridge ]
Gunpowder makes all men alike tall.... Hereby at last is the Goliath powerless and the David resistless; savage animalism is nothing, inventive spiritualism is all. [ Carlyle ]
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince. [ Plato ]
It is always esteemed the greatest mischief a man can do to those whom he loves, to raise men's expectations of them too high by undue and impertinent commendations. [ Sprat ]
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labour and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top. [ Burton ]
Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualisation of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men. [ Whipple ]
Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods carrying the show of a total do secure men, as if they were at furthest. [ Bacon ]
Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life. [ Beecher ]
So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other. [ Johnson ]
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination. [ Swift ]
Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties by which the foolish part of men's minds are taken are more potent. [ Bacon ]
Too austere a philosophy makes few wise men; too rigorous politics, few good subjects; too hard a religion, few religious persons whose devotion is of long continuance. [ St. Evremond ]
If all men would bring their misfortunes together in one place, most would be glad to take his own home again, rather than to take a proportion out of the common stock. [ Solon ]
The ways to enrich are many, and rfiost of thom foul. Parsimony is one of the best, and yet is not innocent; for it withholdeth men from works of liberality and charity. [ Bacon ]
The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. [ South ]
Men love better books which please them than those which instruct. Since their ennui troubles them more than their ignorance, they prefer being amused to being informed. [ L'Abbe Dubois ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting. [ Ruskin ]
Many men build as cathedrals were built, - the part nearest the ground finished, but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete. [ Beecher ]
Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History. [ Carlyle ]
Commonsense in one view is the most uncommon sense. While it is extremely rare in possession, the recognition of it is universal. All men feel it, though few men have it [ H. N. Hudson ]
Books, to judicious compilers, are useful, - to particular arts and professions absolutely necessary, - to men of real science they are tools; but more are tools to them. [ Johnson ]
Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him. [ Emerson ]
He was a kind and thankful toad, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer; and whose spirits rose with eating, as some men's do with drink. [ Washington Irving ]
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing. [ Barrow ]
Let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights; yonder Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous. [ William Shakespeare ]
The good pilot knows the whereabouts of every sunken rock in the harbor; how much of joy there would be in the world if all men knew the sunken rocks in the harbor of life. [ Catherine A. Atmould ]
Those who make antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make accurate figures. [ Pascal ]
A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be contented. [ Beaconsfield ]
No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be. [ Landor ]
I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted. [ Horace Walpole ]
Wise men mingle mirth with their cares, as a help either to forget or overcome them; but to resort to intoxication for the ease of one's mind is to cure melancholy by madness. [ Charron ]
Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. [ Coleridge ]
In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, - the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. [ Carlyle ]
There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the one as the other. [ Butler ]
When men neglect God, they neglect their own safety; they procure their own ruin; they fly from their own happiness; they pursue their own misery, and make haste to be undone. [ J. Mair ]
In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories - the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt. [ James A. Garfield ]
Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us; we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. [ R. W. Emerson ]
It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin. [ Lowell ]
One day, a daughter of Aristotle, Pythias by name, was asked what color pleased her most. She replied, The color with which modesty suffuses the face of simple, inoffensive men.
[ Joubert ]
I cannot see why women are so desirous of imitating men. I could understand the wish to be a boa constrictor, a lion, or an elephant; but a man! that surpasses my comprehension. [ T. Gautier ]
Everything dies, and on this spring morning, if I lay my ear to the ground, I seem to hear from every point of the compass the heavy step of men who carry a corpse to its burial. [ Madame de Gasparin ]
Books are the true metempsychosis, - they are the symbol and presage of immortality. The dead men are scattered, and none shall find them. Behold they are here! they do but sleep. [ Beecher ]
Exaggeration, as to rhetoric, is using a vast force to lift a feather;
as to morals and character, it is using falsehood to lift one's self out of the confidence of his fellow-men. [ Hugo Amot ]
Men, as well as women, are oftener led by their hearts than their understandings. The way to the heart is through the senses; please their eyes and ears, and the work is half done. [ Chesterfield ]
Some old men, by continually praising the time of their youth, would almost persuade us that there were no fools in those days; but unluckily they are left themselves for examples. [ Pope ]
Wise men are wise but not prudent, in that they know nothing of what is for their own advantage, but know surpassing things, marvellous things, difficult things, and divine things. [ John Ruskin ]
Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords. [ Rousseau ]
Men of great learning or genius are too full to be exact, and therefore choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. [ Spectator ]
It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment. [ Lowell ]
If the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between them and that of the fool; there are infinite reveries and numberless extravagancies pass through both. [ Addison ]
Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation. [ Colton ]
The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other's rights, and invade the field of each other's liberty. [ J. G. Holland ]
When women oppose themselves to the projects and ambition of men, they excite their lively resentment; if in their youth they meddle with political intrigues, their modesty must suffer. [ Mme. de Stael ]
There is graciousness and a kind of urbanity in beginning with men by esteem and confidence. It proves, at least, that we have long lived in good company with others and with ourselves. [ Joubert ]
When I beheld human affairs involved in such dense darkness, the guilty exulting in their prosperity, and pious men suffering wrong, what religion I had began to reel backward and fall. [ Claudius, Claudian ]
Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep company some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, isolated peaks. So it is with great men. [ Hare ]
It is too generally true that all that is required to make men unmindful what they owe to God for any blessing is that they should receive that blessing often enough and regularly enough. [ Bishop Whately ]
Most men take least notice of what is plain, as if that was of no use; but puzzle their thoughts to be themselves in those vast depths and abysses which no human understanding can fathom. [ Bishop Sherlock ]
To guide scoundrels by love is a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love do; and for the sediment and scoundrelism of them it has not even a chance to do. [ Carlyle ]
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. [ Burke ]
We declare to you that the earth has exhausted its contingent of master spirits. Now for decadence and general closing. We must make up our minds to it. We shall have no more men of genius. [ Victor Hugo ]
Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business, which are signs of being weary of themselves. [ Sir W. Temple ]
It is expedient to have an acquaintance with those who have looked into the world; who know men, understand business, and can give you good intelligence and good advice when they are wanted. [ Bishop Horne ]
Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation! [ Pascal ]
Unfortunately friends too often weigh one another in their hypochondriacal humours, and in an over-exacting spirit. One must weigh men by avoirdupois weight, and not by the jeweller's scales. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names. [ Ausonius ]
Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. [ Bacon ]
Men with gray eyes are generally keen, energetic, and at first cold; but you may depend upon their sympathy with real sorrow. Search the ranks of our benevolent men and you will agree with me. [ Dr. Leask ]
Men commonly injure one another without cause, and simply to do something: as an idle promenader in a garden, breaks the young branches, and strips off the leaves of the most beautiful flowers. [ E. Souvestre ]
Noble blood! bah! What blood is more noble or so pure as that of the lion? And yet he is only a brute. It is merit, education and virtue, not blood, that lift men above the level of the brutes. [ Michael le Faucheur ]
Common fame is the only liar that deserveth to have some respect still reserved to it: though she telleth many an untruth, she often hits right, and most especially when she speaketh ill of men. [ Saville ]
Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. [ Hazlitt ]
Some men's censures are like the blasts of rams horns before the walls of Jericho; all a man's fame they lay level at one stroke, when all they go upon is only conceit, without any certain basis. [ J. Beaumont ]
Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists; except in the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer expected or recognised as a virtue among men. [ Carlyle ]
Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex? [ Thackeray ]
To live without bitterness, one must turn his eyes toward the ludicrous side of the world, and accustom himself to look at men only as jumping jacks, and at society as the board on which they jump. [ Chamfort ]
We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more conformable to our own natures: fools love folly, and wise men wisdom. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
There is nothing of which men are more liberal than their good advice, be their stock of it ever so small; because it seems to carry in it an intimation of their own influence, importance, or worth. [ Young ]
I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. This appears from the quarrels to which indiscreet reports occasionally give rise. [ Pascal ]
I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men. [ Emerson ]
Men are what their mothers made them; you may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, wiry it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. [ R. W. Emerson ]
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and stars. [ Coleridge ]
In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits. [ Chamfort ]
The blindness of men is the most dangerous effect of their pride; it seems to nourish and augment it: it deprives them of knowledge of remedies which can solace their miseries and can cure their faults. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Men and communities in this world are often in the position of Arctic explorers, who are making great speed in a given direction, while the ice-floe beneath them is making greater speed in the opposite. [ John Burroughs ]
It is observed at sea that men are never so much disposed to grumble and mutiny as when least employed. Hence an old captain, when there was nothing else to do, would issue the order to scour the anchor.
[ Samuel Smiles ]
Men are tatooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [ Bible ]
The heart, when broken, is like sweet gums and spices when beaten; for as such cast their fragrant scent into the nostrils of men, so the heart, when broken, casts its sweet smell into the nostrils of God. [ Bunyan ]
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it. [ Carlyle ]
Friendship is impossible between men of high social standing and men in the lower walks of life; very difficult between a young man and a young woman; between two beautiful women, it is but a poetic fiction.
Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary. [ Hamilton W. Mabie ]
There is, I know not how, in the minds of men, a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls. [ Cicero ]
No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but certainly not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following openly-declared purposes, and preaching candidly-beloved and trusted creeds. [ John Ruskin ]
It is the violence of their ideas and the blind haste of their passion that make men awkward when with women. A man who has blunted a little his sensations, at first studies to please rather than to be loved. [ George Sand ]
There are two modes of establishing our reputation - to be praised by honest men, and to be abused by rogues. It is best, however, to secure the former, because it will be invariably accompanied by the latter. [ Colton ]
The heart will commonly govern the head, and it is certain that any strong passion, set the wrong way, will soon infatuate even the wisest of men, therefore the first part of wisdom is to watch the affections. [ Dr. Waterland ]
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [ Thomas Jefferson ]
There are two ways of establishing your reputation, - to be praised by honest men, and to be abused by rogues. It is best, however, to secure the former, because it will be invariably accompanied by the latter. [ Colton ]
If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with the comment of the various deaths of men; and it could not but be useful, for who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. [ Montaigne ]
There should be no fear. We are protected, and we will always be protected. We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement. And most importantly, we will be protected by god. [ President Donald J. Trump, Presidential Inaugeration Speech, Jan 20, 2017 ]
Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers. [ Helvetius ]
It is in the relaxation of security, it is in the expansion of prosperity, it is in the hour of dilation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure that the real character of men is discerned. [ Burke ]
The sordid meal of the Cynics contributed neither to their tranquillity nor to their modesty. Pride went with Diogenes into his tub; and there he had the presumption to command Alexander the haughtiest of all men. [ Henry Home ]
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me. I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. [ Lamb ]
He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, - of men ia distant countries and in past times. [ Emerson ]
Fine sense and exalted sense are not half as useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense. And he that will carry nothing about him but gold will be every day at a loss for readier change. [ Pope ]
Doubtless botany has its value; but the flowers knew how to preach divinity before men knew how to dissect and botanize them; they are apt to stop preaching, though, so soon as we begin to dissect and botanize them. [ H. N. Hudson ]
If as much care were taken to perpetuate a race of fine men as is done to prevent the mixture of ignoble blood in horses and dogs, the genealogy of every one would be written on his face and displayed in his manners. [ Voltaire ]
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. [ Lord Bacon ]
There is no such thing as Liberty in the universe: there can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment. [ John Ruskin ]
All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little; something which they value far more than for its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. [ Theodore Parker ]
Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those that come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave. [ Ruskin ]
What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men. [ Samuel Warren ]
A woman whose great beauty eclipses all others is seen with as many different eyes as there are people who look at her. Pretty women gaze with envy, homely women with spite, old men with regret, young men with transport. [ D'Argens ]
Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the plurality in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. [ John Ruskin ]
It is right that man should love those who have offended him. He will do so when he remembers that all men are his relations, and that it is through ignorance and involuntarily that they sin, - and then we all die so soon. [ Marcus Aurelius ]
The Carlyles were men who lavished their heart and conscience upon their work; they builded themselves, their days, their thoughts and sorrows, into their houses; they leavened the soil with the sweat of their rugged brows. [ John Burroughs ]
Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. [ Thomas Carlyle ]
The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. [ Macaulay ]
Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence. [ Hazlitt ]
Many men want wealth, - not a competence alone, but a five-story competence. Everything subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off by and by the bolts of Divine wrath. [ Beecher ]
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. [ Thoreau ]
Love works miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favoring the passions, destroying reason, and, in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
It is not ease, but effort - not facility, but difficulty, that makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved. [ Samuel Smiles ]
I have no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for; a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which, methinks, are diversely presetted unto me, as from a common theatre or scene. [ Burton ]
Great men are the fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed, embodied possibilities of human nature. [ Carlyle ]
Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts. [ Whipple ]
An honest reputation is within the reach of all men; they obtain it by social virtues, and by doing their duty. This kind of reputation, it is true, is neither brilliant nor startling, but it is often the most useful for happiness. [ Duclos ]
There are jilts in friendship, as well as in love; and by the behavior of some men in both, one would almost imagine that they industriously sought to gain the affections of others with the view only of making the parties miserable. [ Fielding ]
As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting must be spoken, and then away upon the deep, so men meet in this world; and I think we should cross no man's path without hailing him, and if he needs giving him supplies. [ Beecher ]
It has been shrewdly said, that when men abuse us we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve; and still more rare to despise praise which we do. [ Colton ]
That which is won ill, will never wear well, for there is a curse attends it, which will waste it; and the same corrupt dispositions which incline men to the sinful ways of getting, will incline them to the like sinful ways of spending. [ Matthew Henry ]
There are many arts among men, the knowledge of which is acquired bit by bit by experience. For it is experience that causes our life to move forward by the skill we acquire, while want of experience subjects us to the effects of chance. [ Plato ]
I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses. [ Beecher ]
Laissez faire, the "let alone" principle, is, in all things which man has to do with, the principle of death. It is ruin to him, certain and total, if he lets his land alone, if he lets his fellow-men alone, if he lets his own soul alone. [ John Ruskin ]
Let us not envy some men their accumulated riches; their burden would be too heavy for us; we could not sacrifice, as they do, health, quiet, honor, and conscience, to obtain them: it is to pay so dear for them that the bargain is a loss. [ Bruyere ]
Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again are plain, honest and upright, like the broad-faced sunflower and hollyhock. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
He said - and his observation was just - that a man on whom heaven hath bestowed a beautiful wife should be as cautious of the men he brings home to his house as careful of observing the female friends with whom his spouse converses abroad. [ Cervantes ]
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while. [ Emerson ]
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye. [ Ruskin ]
The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal today, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal tomorrow. [ Anthony Trollope ]
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. [ Colton ]
The curse and peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country, is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge. [ Richard Grant White ]
Seek such union to the Son of God as, leaving no present death within, shall make the second death impossible, and shall leave in all your future only that shadow of death which men call dissolution, and which the gospel calls sleeping in Jesus. [ James Hamilton ]
Without earnestness no man is ever great, or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight. No soulmoving picture was ever painted that had not in it depth of shadow. [ Peter Bayne ]
Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes hacking one another's flesh, converting precious living bodies and priceless living souls into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure. [ Carlyle ]
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down to the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. [ Edwin Percy Whipple ]
A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again. [ Guizot ]
There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. [ Henry Clay ]
There is before the eyes of men, on the brink of dissolution, a glassy film, which death appears to impart, that they may have a brief prospect of eternity when some behold the angels of light, while others have the demons of darkness before them. [ Cockton ]
Philosophers and men of letters have done more for mankind than Orpheus, Hercules, or Theseus; for it is more meritorious and more difficult to wean men from their prejudices than to civilize the barbarian: It is harder to correct than to instruct. [ Voltaire ]
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right. [ Henry George ]
Much of what is great, and to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended nor knew the good they did; and many mighty harmonies have been discoursed by instruments that had been dumb and discordant but that God knew their stops. [ John Ruskin ]
He that is ambitious for his son, should give him untried names, For those have served other men, haply may injure by their evils; Or otherwise may hinder by their glories; therefore set him by himself. To win for his individual name some clear praise. [ Tupper ]
The reasonable worship of a just God who punishes and rewards, would undoubtedly contribute to the happiness of men; but when that salutary knowledge of a just God is disfigured by absurd lies and dangerous superstitions, then the remedy turns to poison. [ Voltaire ]
Without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it. [ Matthew Arnold ]
Enthusiasm is the element of success in everything. It is the light that leads and the strength that lifts men on and up in the great struggles of scientific pursuits and of professional labor. It robs endurance of difficulty, and makes a pleasure of duty. [ Bishop Doane ]
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. [ Bacon ]
In Athens the ladies were not gaudily but simply arrayed, and we doubt whether any ladies ever excited more admiration. So also the noble old Roman matrons, whose superb forms were gazed on delightedly by men worthy of them, were always very plainly dressed. [ George D. Prentice ]
When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults. [ Agapet ]
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. [ Emerson ]
Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. But the direct contrary I believe to be the case. Rude periods have that grossness of manners, which is as unfriendly to virtue as luxury itself. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished. [ Warton ]
What is the world, or its opinion, to him who has studied in the lives of men the mysteries of their egotism and perfidy! He knows that the best and most generous hearts are often forced to tread the thorny paths, where insults and outrages are heaped upon them! [ George Sand ]
The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities. [ Emerson ]
There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God. that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. [ James A. Garfield ]
Ask men of genius how much they owe to their mothers, and you will find that they attribute almost all to them and their influence; and if we could only guage the mental capacity of the wives of great men, we might perhaps learn why genius is so seldom hereditary. [ Lord Kames ]
The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions. [ Burke ]
Not in a man's having no business with men, but in having no unjust business with them, and in having all manner of true and just business, can either his or their blessedness be found possible, and this waste world become, for both parties, a home and peopled garden. [ Carlyle ]
Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external Nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the labourers on the surface do not even dream. [ Longfellow ]
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. [ Lowell ]
Bear your burden manfully. Boys at school, young men who have exchanged boyish liberty for serious business - all who have got a task to do, a work to finish - bear the burden till God gives the signal for repose - till the work is done, and the holiday is fairly earned. [ James Hamilton ]
To men addicted to delights, business is an interruption; to such as are cold to delights, business is an entertainment. For which reason it was said to one who commended a dull man for his application: No thanks to him; if he had no business, he would have nothing to do.
[ Steele ]
Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them; almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel readers, as well as young boys and girls, and their kind, tender mothers. [ Thackeray ]
Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels, - teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and the world's good. [ Samuel Smiles ]
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices. [ Beecher ]
What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice. [ Ruskin ]
There is a Russian proverb which says that misfortune is next door to stupidity; and it will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, improvidence, or want of application. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Blessings we enjoy daily; and for most of them, because they be so common, most men forget to pay their praises; but let not us, because it is a sacrifice so pleasing to Him that made the sun and us, and still protects us, and gives us flowers and showers and meat and content. [ Izaak Walton ]
Men of quality never appear more amiable than when their dress is plain. Their birth, rank, title and its appendages are at best invidious; and as they do not need the assistance of dress, so, by their disclaiming the advantage of it, they make their superiority sit more easy. [ Shenstone ]
Great men, though far above us, are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history. [ Moses Harvey ]
If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her case is desperate; and if she goes greater lengths than the men, and leaves the pale of propriety farther behind her, it is because she is aware that all return is prohibited, and by none so strongly as by her own sex. [ Colton ]
I pity men who occupy themselves exclusively with the transitory in things and lose themselves in the study of what is perishable, since we are here for this very end that we may make the perishable imperishable, which we can do only after we have learned how to appreciate both. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes; and if you hint to a man that you think him silly, ignorant, or even ill-bred, or awkward, he will hate you more and longer than if you tell him plainly that you think him a rogue. [ Chesterfield ]
If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. [ Emerson ]
Honest men esteem and value nothing so much in this world as a real friend. Such a one is as it were another self, to whom we impart our most secret thoughts, who partakes of our joy, and comforts us in our affliction; add to this, that his company is an everlasting pleasure to us. [ Pilpay ]
There is in some men a dispassionate neutrality of mind, which, though it generally passes for good temper, can neither gratify nor warm us: it must indeed be granted that these men can only negatively offend; but then it should also be remembered that they cannot positively please. [ Lord Greville ]
One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world is their finding so little there. Generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason the countrymen escape the smallpox, - because they meet no one to give it to them. [ Greville ]
There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero. [ Fielding ]
Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise - the head, the heart, are stuffed with goods. There are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by taste, and love, and joy, and worship, but they are all deserted now, and the rooms are filled with earthy and material things. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
There is a sort of harmless liars, frequently to be met with in company, who deal much in exaggeration; their usual intention is to please and entertain; but as men are most delighted with what they conceive to be truth, these people mistake the means of pleasing, and incur universal blame. [ Hume ]
The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so. [ Ruskin ]
I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first place, I do not like to think myself growing old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression. [ J. Beaumont ]
As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men's minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels. [ Colton ]
The world is divided into two armies. Men make offensive war, women defensive. Love exalts and excites the two parties. They meet hand to hand. Love throws himself into their midst, agitating his torch. But the struggle differs from other battles: instead of destroying, it multiplies the combatants. [ S. Marechal ]
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut. [ Goethe ]
Dangers are no more light if they once seem light, and more dangers have deceived men than forced them; nay, it were better to meet some dangers half-way, though they come nothing near, than to keep too long a watch upon their approaches; for if a man watch too long it is odds be will fall fast asleep. [ Bacon ]
There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. [ John Ruskin ]
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner time; keep back the tears, and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, Oh, nothing!
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others. [ George Eliot ]
Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great empire of silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there each in his department, silently thinking, silently working; whom no morning newspaper makes mention of. [ Carlyle ]
The failure of his mind in old age is often less the result of natural decay than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment brings indolence: indolence, decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy. [ Sir Benjamin Brodie ]
Liberty, and not theology, is the enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. The very men who would once have been conspicuous saints are now conspicuous revolutionists, for while their heroism and disinterestedness are their own, the direction which these qualities take is determined by the pressure of the age. [ H. W. Lecky ]
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at pace, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence. [ Colton ]
Ridicule intrinsically is a small faculty; we may say, the smallest of all faculties that other men are at the pains to repay with any esteem. It is directly opposed to thought, to knowledge, properly so called; its nourishment and essence is denial, which hovers on the surface, while knowledge dwells far below. [ Carlyle ]
The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue. [ Dr. Johnson ]
It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause. [ Adam Clarke ]
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority - demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice - comes graceful and beloved as a bride. [ Emerson ]
The morbid states of health, the irritableness of disposition arising from unstrung nerves, the impatience, the crossness, the fault-finding of men, who, full of morbid influences, are unhappy themselves, and throw the cloud of their troubles like a dark shadow upon others, teach us what eminent duty there is in health. [ Beecher ]
Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. [ Watts ]
Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects. [ Johnson ]
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and love of fellow men, we engrave on those tablets something which will brighten all eternity. [ Daniel Webster ]
Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, - they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history and truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. [ Mary Wortley Montagu ]
Wise men, for the most part, are silent at present, and good men powerless; the senseless vociferate, and the heartless govern; while all social law and providence are dissolved by the enraged agitation of a multitude, among whom every villain has a chance of power, every simpleton of praise, and every scoundrel of fortune. [ John Ruskin ]
Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to him, try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and life is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admire, - they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly. [ Thackeray ]
Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience; which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective. [ Chesterfield ]
At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day. [ Hawthorne ]
Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle; and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hardworking, and intent men - their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others. [ Samuel Smiles ]
As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them, and which, if you do otherwise, emit what is unpleasant and noxious, so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsatisfactory and unsafe. [ Landor ]
Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail, but in conveying a right impression; and there are vague ways of speaking that are truer than strict facts would be. When the Psalmist said, "Rivers of water run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," he did not state the fact but he stated a truth deeper than fact and truer. [ Dean Alford ]
Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose - a power to accomplish all that we undertake;
for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry. Pope in painting. Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men. [ Colton ]
The study of art possesses this great and peculiar charm, that it is absolutely unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. By private interests, by political questions, men are deeply divided, and set at variance; but beyond and above all such party strifes, they are attracted and united by a taste for the beautiful in art. [ Guizot ]
As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. [ Fielding ]
There are so many things to lower a man's top-sails - he is such a dependent creature - he is to pay such court to his stomach, his food, his sleep, his exercise - that, in truth, a hero is an idle word. Man seems formed to be a hero in suffering, not a hero in action. Men err in nothing more than in the estimate which they make of human labor. [ Cecil ]
I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore. [ Melmoth ]
It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art. in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts made by successive generations of men - the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Mankind are in the end always governed by superiority of intellectual faculties, and none are more sensible of this than the military profession. When, on my return from Italy, I assumed the dress of the Institute, and associated with men of science, I knew what I was doing: I was sure of not being misunderstood by the lowest drummer boy in the army. [ Napoleon I ]
I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely, and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they have occasion. [ J. Locke ]
What is it that keeps men in continual discontent and agitation? It is that they cannot make realities correspond with their conceptions, that enjoyment steals away from among their hands, that the wished-for comes too late, and nothing reached and acquired produces on the heart the effect which their longing for it at a distance led them to anticipate. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. [ Lamb ]
The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice. [ Swift ]
The powers of music are felt or known by all men, and are allowed to work strangely upon the mind and the body, the passions and the blood; to raise joy and grief; to give pleasure and pain; to cure diseases, and the mortal sting of the tarantula; to give motions to the feet as well as the heart; to compose disturbed thoughts; to assist and heighten devotion itself. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. [ Sir Thomas Browns ]
There is still a real magic in the action and reaction of minds on one another. The casual deliration of a few becomes, by this mysterious reverberation, the frenzy of many; men lose the use, not only of their understandings, but of their bodily senses; while the most obdurate unbelieving hearts melt like the rest in the furnace where all are cast as victims and as fuel. [ Carlyle ]
We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. [ Emerson ]
I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to be an eclipse and tell the cave men, If I have come to destroy you, may the sun be blotted out from the sky.
Just then the eclipse would start, and they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second; for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely. [ Bacon ]
Necessary or Essential? Necessary signifies not to be departed from, and is a general and an indefinite term. The essential contains that essence or property which cannot be omitted. It is necessary for men to die. Exercise is essential to the preservation of health. There is an essential difference between gold and silver. Here we could not properly use necessary for essential. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary. [ Hazlitt ]
All are to be men of genius in their degree, - rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things, known and numbered, but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks, on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so pass on. [ Ruskin ]
If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion at Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. [ Burke ]
Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters. [ Colton ]
Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.
Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]
There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]
Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries; and, though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, philosopher, and historian, - the humble listener, - there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come. [ James A. Garfield ]
Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge - conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him. [ Ruskin ]
Do you wish to become rich? You may become rich, that is, if you desire it in no half way, but thoroughly. A miser sacrifices all to his single passion; hoards farthings and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to master any science or accomplishment? Give yourself to it and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do anything. This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come. [ F. W. Robertson ]
Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs, are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. [ Helps ]
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. [ Emerson ]
Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it is, as Mr. Burke calls it, the cheap defense and ornament of nations.
It produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy. [ Sydney Smith ]
Throughout the pages of history we are struck with the fact that our remarkable men possessed mothers of uncommon talents for good or bad, and great energy of character; it would almost seem from this circumstance, that the impress of the mother is more frequently stamped on the boy, and that of the father upon the girl - we mean the mental intellectual impress, in distinction from the physical ones. Mothers will do well to remember that their impress is often stamped upon their sons. [ Helen Mar ]
Business in a certain sort of men is a mark of understanding, and they are honored for it. Their souls seek repose in agitation, as children do by being rocked in a cradle. They may pronounce themselves as serviceable to their friends as troublesome to themselves. No one distributes his money to others, but every one therein distributes his time and his life. There is nothing of which we are so prodigal as of those two things, of which to be thrifty would be both commendable and useful. [ Montaigne ]
Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these interTafs. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains. [ Orville Dewey ]
There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive. [ H. W. Beecher ]
No process is so fatal as that which would cast all men in one mould. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations. It is to wear innumerable forms of beauty and glory. Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influences to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. [ Channing ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. [ Addison ]
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]
The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, - not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives, - of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive. [ Joseph Anderson ]
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]
No woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That has all gone out now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge: it is immortal as the heart of men. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will then sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on. as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. [ Wordsworth ]