Men Quotes

Always aim for achievement, and forget about success.

Helen Hayes

Men trust their ears less than their eyes.

Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus

It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.

Robert Southey

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

William Lippmann

Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.

Pythagorus

False enchantment can last a lifetime.

W. H. Auden

Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.

Buddha

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

Simone de Beauvoir, "A Very Easy Death".

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Benjamin Franklin

Explain it as we may, a martial strain will urge a man into the front rank of battle sooner than an argument, and a fine anthem excite his devotion more certainly than a logical discourse.

Henry Tuckerman

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

George Bernard Shaw

Religion is the monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

William James

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.

Alice Thomas Ellis

If a man remembers what is right at the sign of profit, is ready to lay down his life in the face of danger, and does not forget sentiments he has repeated all his life when he has been in straitened circumstances for a long time, he may be said to be a complete man.

Confucius, Analects, XIV. 12

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.

Cyril Connolly

It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die... None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.

Jean Guehenno

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

Johann von Goethe

All movements go too far.

Bertrand Russell

And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being.

Lord Byron

No one but a theorist believes his theory; everyone puts faith in a laboratory result but the experimenter himself.

Albert Einstein, quoted in Scientific American, September 2004, page 69

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

Josh Billings

Let the punishment match the offense.

Cicero, De Legibus

My salad days, When I was green in judgment.

William Shakespeare, "Antony and Cleopatra", Act 1 scene 5

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire...

Socrates, Quoted in: Plato, Phaedrus.

Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

James Thurbe

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

Muriel Rukeyse

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

Thomas Carlyle

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Rebecca West

No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.

J. Michael Straczynski

Little said is soonest mended.

Miguel de Cervantes

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Henry David Thoreau

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects