Quotes
Quotes about Men
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Tears are not arguments.
There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
Let early education be a sort of amusement, you will then better be able to find out the natural bent of the child.
Some fellows pay a compliment like they expected a receipt.
The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Be yourself and do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.
If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.
We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
