Wise Quotes about Men

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph
is for enough good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill

When men are easy in their circumstances,
they are naturally enemies to innovations.
- Joseph Addison

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood
between sincere men of all denominations.
- Helen Keller

Men of lofty genius,
when they are doing the least work,
are most active.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Men in general judge more from
appearances than from reality. All
men have eyes, but few have
the gift of penetration.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

Men and women are not prisoners of fate,
but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Man becomes great exactly in the degree
in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Many men go fishing all of their lives
without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
- Henry David Thoreau

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

Truth is the property of no individual
but is the treasure of all men.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are not prisoners of fate,
but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Wise men put their trust in ideas
and not in circumstances
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right.
Men will believe what they see.
- Henry David Thoreau

Men are disturbed not by things,
but by the view which they take of them.
- Epictetus

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste
that they hurry past it.
- Soren Kierkegaard

I do not believe in a fate that
falls on men however they act;
but I do believe in a fate
that falls on them unless they act.
- The Buddha

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
- Abraham Lincoln

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed,
for if you merely offend them, they take vengeance,
but if you injure them greatly, they are unable to retaliate,
so that the injury done to a man
ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

The majority of men meet with failure
because of their lack of persistence
in creating new plans to take
the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill

For those men who, sooner or later, are lucky enough
to break away from the pack, the most intoxicating moment
comes when they cease being bodies in other men's command
and find that they control their own time,
when they learn their own voice and authority.
- Theodore H. White

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking.
There is an almost universal quest
for easy answers and half-baked solutions.
Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is a good ear, in some men,
that draws supplies to virtue
out of very indifferent nutriment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Women must try to do things as men have tried.
When they fail their failure must be
but a challenge to others.
- Amelia Earhart

There are times, sir, when men of good conscience
cannot blindly follow orders.
- Captain Picard, STAR TREK: The Next Generation

Great men or men of great gifts
you shall easily find,
but symmetrical men never.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reason why men do not obey us,
is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Achievement seems to be connected with action.
Successful men and women keep moving.
They make mistakes, but they don't quit.
- Conrad Hilton

Who never walks save where he sees
men's tracks, makes no discoveries.
- J. G. Holland

The only good luck many great men ever had was
being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.
- Channing Pollock

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation
and go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Henry David Thoreau

Shallow men believe in luck.
Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.
Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
- Henry David Thoreau

The problems of the world cannot possibly
be solved by skeptics or cynics
whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
- John F. Kennedy

Trust men and they will be true to you;
treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

All successful people men and women are big dreamers.
They imagine what their future could be,
ideal in every respect,
and then they work every day toward
their distant vision,
that goal or purpose.
- Brian Tracy

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him,
that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men,
and when he devotes himself helpfully
to all life that is in need of help.
- Albert Schweitzer

The difference between men friends and women friends
is that men tend to do things together,
women tend to just be together.
- Art Jahnke

The River of Life has no judgments.
The River flows with no concept of good and bad - right and wrong.
The fields and dreams of men may be nourished by the River of Life,
or flooded and covered with silt, and the River just flows.
Men may catch fish and live on the River of Life,
or they may founder in a storm and drown, and the River just flows.
The River of Life is timeless.
It is not unchanging, but it is timeless,
and it changes in its own time.
The River of Life knows no obstacles.
The River can cut through solid rock - in its own time.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason
if we dig deep in our history and remember
that we are not descended from fearful men,
not from men who feared to write, to speak,
to associate and to defend causes
which were for the moment unpopular.
- Edward R. Murrow

The highest result of education is tolerance.
Long ago men fought and died for their faith;
but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, -
the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren
and their rights of conscience.
- Helen Keller

The revelation of thought takes men
out of servitude into freedom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not work that kills men; it is worry.
Worry is rust upon the blade.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it,
while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill.
The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation
is the same as in the life of the individual.
Pessimism kills the instinct that
urges men to struggle against poverty,
ignorance and crime, and dries up
all the fountains of joy in the world.
- Helen Keller

Men kick friendship around like a football,
but it doesn't seem to crack.
Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize.
The first is gentleness;
the second is frugality;
the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others.
Be gentle and you can be bold;
be frugal and you can be generous;
avoid putting yourself before others
and you can become a leader among men.
- Lao Tzu

I look only to the good qualities of men.
Not being faultless myself,
I won't presume to probe into the faults of others.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Real friendships among men are so rare
that when they occur they are famous.
- Clarence Day

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour
when every one has to throw off his mask?
Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?
Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight
in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?
I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others
that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;...
In every man there is something which to a certain degree
prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself;
and this may be the case in so high a degree,
he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life
which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself.
But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love,
and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men
is primarily based on mutual trust
and only secondarily on institutions
such as courts of justice and police.
- Albert Einstein

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
- Calvin Coolidge

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
- Elbert Hubbard

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures
from the shelter of compassion and pity,
you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
- St. Francis of Assisi

The highest proof of the spirit is love.
Love is the eternal thing which men can already
on earth possess as it really is.
- Albert Schweitzer

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery
as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man.
All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are,
the more they are frightened.
- George S. Patton

Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
- Helen Keller

Women want mediocre men,
and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
- Margaret Mead

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Wisdom Quotes