Men

“ Go, dress up all the virtues of human nature in all the beauties of your oratory, and declaim aloud on the praise of social virtue and the amiable qualities of goodness, till your hearts or lungs ache, among the looser herds of mankind, and you will ever find, as your heathen fathers have done before you, that the wild appetites and passions of men are too violent to be restrained by such mild and silken language. ”

“ In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment—religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, &c.—the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. ”

“ Men should be judged, not by their tint of skin,
⁠The Gods they serve, the Vintage that they drink,
Nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin,
⁠But by the quality of thought they think. ”

“ I had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high places — the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the editors. ”

“ O searcher--out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou hast produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life. ”

“ The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. ”

“ No matter; we are not upon stilts, talking down to a class of inferior men, in a condescending tone, on a subject above their comprehension; but we are addressing men, and the sons of men, who are our equals—although, like ourself, upon their farms, taking their share in its daily toils, as well as pleasures—and can perfectly well understand our language, and sympathize with our thoughts. ”

“ Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and anxious cares, and busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free. ”

“ Wilt thou have me govern or live privately, or stay at home, or go into exile, or be a poor man or a rich? For all these conditions I will be thy advocate with men—I show the nature of each of them, what it is. ”

“ The lesson of this book—of every book of biography or of history—is that men are noble and useful in proportion as they are true to that law of an enlightened conscience which represents to them the will and the voice of God. ”

“ How men lived from day to day, what their occupations were, their comforts and discomforts, their ideas, sentiments, and modes of intercourse, their state as regards art, letters, invention, religious enlightenment,—these are points on which history, as at present studied and written, undertakes to shed light. ”

“ Equipped with this outfit of criteria he looks upon life and finds it complete or wanting, tests his fellow men and approves or condemns, examines all created things and calls them good or bad. But he is so constituted that his acquiescence is likely to be somewhat passive, and his protests active, his commendation grudging and qualified, his condemmation sweeping and thorough. ”

“ Thus, men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong. ”

“ On the farm and in the shop, behind the counter and at the bar, in congress and in senate, on the platform and in the pulpit, we find some, who, by inheritance, environment, personal effort and the grace of God, have become examples of ideal manhood. But look at men in the mass. How few examples of perfect manhood do you find in a crowd of ten thousand men? ”

“ Men rocked the cradle of its hopes, great, firm, disinterested, men, who saw, who wrote, as the basis of all that was to be done, a statement of the rights, the inborn rights of men, which, if fully interpreted and acted upon, leaves nothing to be desired. ”

“ I conjure you all to look into your hearts, and to hearken to the secret voice of conscience. Is there any among you who can find, throughout the universe, a more upright, more enlightened and more honourable body than your magistracy? ”

“ I concede to you conscientious motives in what you do. You are sustained by those around you, men of intellect, men of character. I respect them while I differ from them. I appeal, however, to a higher law, and that, I think, sustains me. ”

“ Men who thought effectively, or upon whom it fell to decide for others, or to construct or imagine for them, such, whether pleasure-loving, secularly ambitious, or immersed in contemplation of the life beyond the grave, accepted certain beliefs, recognized certain authoritatively prescribed ideals of conduct and well-being, and did not reject the processes of proof supporting them. ”

“ The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. ”

“ But even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. ”

“ On starting in life, then, I would charge and beseech you to rise to the true elevation of your nature. Among men there are five classes. The lowest class are the slaves of fleshly appetites. These are the sensual, the debauched, the lascivious, the drunken. The second class obey the world, and judge after the worldly standard. These are the lovers of pleasure, lovers of style, lovers of money, lovers of power. The third class are the intellectual. ”

“ To state the object, which I have in view, I shall observe at once, that men are divided in opinion as to the lawfulness, or expediency, or wholesomeness of many of the customs, fashions, and accomplishments of the world. ”

“ But the just harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the stern and the humane virtues, the habitual observance of every law, not only of moral rectitude, but of moral grace and dignity, distinguish him from all men who have been tried by equally strong temptations, and about whose conduct we possess equally full information. ”

“ But for these last four chapters we have been writing almost entirely not about mankind generally, but only about the men who thought, the men who could draw and read and write, the men who were altering their world. Beneath their activities what was the life of the mute multitude? ”

“ Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. ”

“ All the elements in human nature which men are familiar with in normal circumstances made themselves felt here, capacity for leadership, love, jealousy, temptation, treachery, justice, but strongest of all, hope in the future. ”

“ If it came to a question of believing you or believing me, who do you think Society would believe—a man of some position, one in the baronetage of Great Britain, or a man—well, not to put too fine a point on it—like you? ”

“ The conventional swathing-bands with which modern society has bound itself were unknown. Men lived boldly from within, and what they said and did had broad human significance, and forecast naturally what men would say and do under the same conditions to the end of time. ”

“ Many differences in degree or detail there have been, of course, in the various historic embodiments of these ideals; but for the sake of making clear the fundamental contrast we may neglect these individual divergences and group together those on the one hand who have called men to a fuller, completer life and those who have summoned them to an austerer and purer life, free from taint of sin and regret. ”

“ But what are thought and commonly said most to demonstrate and try the tempers of men, namely, authority and place, by moving every passion, and discovering every frailty, these are things which Demosthenes never received; ”

“ These will tell us what men have been in their practice, and from thence, you may judge what they are by nature, while unrenewed. If I am not mistaken, a cool and candid attention, either to the past history, or present state of the world, but above all, to the ravages of lawless power, ought to humble us in the dust. ”

“ That men are, only in a comparatively small number of cases, intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual, in the degree which I have described, does not, by any means, deprive our argument of its force. ”

“ A knowledge of the characters of men, as they appear varied in different situations and countries;—the study of human nature indeed in all its forms and modifications, is highly interesting to the mind, and worthy the attention of the greatest man. ”

“ Or, shall I state it thus?—The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. ”

“ With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. ”

“ Everywhere we still see around us the [192] surviving relics of this primitive tendency of men to project their own personalities into external objects. A fine civilisation lies largely in the due subordination of this tendency, in the realisation and control of our own emotional possibilities, and in the resultant growth of personal responsibility. ”

“ In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. ”

“ The great body of the people — that is, men, women and children — were never asked, or even permitted, to signify, in any formal manner, either openly or secretly, their choice or wish on the subject. ”

“ Though they are members of a civilized society, they may, in some measure, be looked on as a body of uncivilized men, rough, passionate, revengeful, but likewise brave, sincere, and true to each other. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ THE AGE OF COMPARISON.—The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives ; the greater, again, in proportion thereto, the outward restlessness, the confused flux of mankind, the polyphony of strivings. ”

“ Should he meet with what I call real men—men of independent minds and sterling principles, with enlarged ideas of life and its aims—intercourse with such persons will doubtless elevate his own character and widen his views. ”

“ Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. ”

“ On the other hand, because men preyed on one another, [262] should he turn his back upon a so-called civilization? The answer came to him then, clear and unmistakable. Since he had been a boy, the strong masked man had gone to nature for his education. ”

“ It would be a stern morality indeed which could look upon the excesses of this peculiar class as it would upon the same excesses committed by men in the enjoyment of all the comforts and pleasures of civilized life. ”