Great Throughts Treasury

"Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"The majority of men are more capable of great actions than of good ones." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"Through a fatality inseparable from human nature, moderation in great men is very rare: and as it is always much easier to push on force in the direction in which it moves than to stop its movement, so in the superior class of the people, it is less difficult, perhaps, to find men extremely virtuous, than extremely prudent." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, and he who keeps back the truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal or both." - Prentice Mulford

"Great men... have been characterized by the greatness of their mistakes as well as by the greatness of their achievements." - Abraham M Myerson

"Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful." -

"I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals." -

"So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not on your own true path but on someone else's." -

"The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct." -

"The value of a man can only be measured with regard to other men." -

"It would truly be a fine thing if men suffered themselves to be guided by reason, that they should acquiesce in the true remonstrances addressed to them by the writings of the learned and the advice of friends. But the greater part are so disposed that the words which enter by one ear do incontinently go out of the other, and begin again by following the custom. The best teacher one can have is necessity." - François de La Noüe

"I know of but one remedy against the fear of death that is effectual and that will stand the test of a sick-bed, or of a sound mind - that is, a good life, a clear conscience, an honest heart, and a well-ordered conversation; to carry the thoughts of dying men about us, and so to live before we die as we shall wish we had when we come to it." - Kathleen Norris

"The world is blessed most by men who do things, and not by those who merely talk about them." - James Oliver

"They set the slave free, striking off his chains. Then he was as much of a slave as ever. He was still chained to servility. He was still manacled to indolence and sloth, he was still bound by fear and superstition, by ignorance suspicion and savagery. His slavery was not in the chains, but in himself. They can only set free men free. And there is no need of that. Free men set themselves free." - José Joaquín de Olmedo, fully José Joaquín de Olmedo y Maruri

"Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and angels know of us." - Thomas Paine

"Two men please God - who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not." - Nikita Ivanovich Panin

"Thus we men, as God transmutes himself into one, we likewise on earth should resign ourselves and become one." -

"Every man has at times in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character... Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself." - Joseph Parker

"No true manhood can be trained by a merely intellectual process. You cannot train men by the intellect alone; you must train them by the heart." - Joseph Parker

"All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little - something which they value for more than its use and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life." - Theodore Parker

"Every man has, at times, in his mind the ideal of what should be, but is not. In all men that seek to improve, it is better than the actual character." - Theodore Parker

"Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward, is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time." - Theodore Parker

"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 frightened. The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on. Discipline, pride, self-respect, self-confidence, and the love of glory are attributes which will make a man courageous even when he is afraid." -

"Men may tire themselves in a labyrinth of search, and talk of God; but if we would know Him indeed, it must be from the impressions we receive of Him; and the softer our hearts are, the deeper and livelier those will be upon us." - William Penn

"Men who fight about religion have no religion to fight about, since they do in the name of religion the thin which religion itself forbids. To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious. It were better to be of no church than to be bitter in any." - William Penn

"Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds." - Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

"To be pious towards God is to be affectionate towards men." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

"Wise men do not wait till the calamity is upon them." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

"Men's tongues are a sharper weapon than the sword." - Phocylides NULL

"The one thing most alien to men - humanity." - Leo Pinsker, aka Yehudah Leib Pinsker, Lev Semyonovich Pinsker

"All men love themselves." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"Enemies carry about slander, not in the form in which it took its rise... The scandal of men is everlasting; even then does it survive when you would suppose it to be dead." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"Men understand the worth of blessings only when they have lost them." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life." - Plotinus NULL

"Self-love leads men of narrow minds to measure all mankind by their own capacity." - Jane Porter

"Freedom means mastery of your world. Fear and greed are common sources of bondage. We are afraid, beset by anxiety. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We seem so helpless over against the forces that move now without apparent thought for men. And our inner freedom is destroyed by greed. We think that if we only had enough goods we should be free, happy, without care. And so there comes the lust for money, and slavery to the world of things. The world can enslave; it can never make us free." - H. F. Rall, fully Harris Franklin

"Women’s chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy." - Estelle R. Ramey, born Stella Rosemary Rubin

"Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish." - Theodor Reik

"If a man sow evil, he shall reap evil increase; if men do to him as he has done, it will be true justice." -

"Fortune [money] does not change men; it only unmasks them." - Madame Riccoboni, fully Marie Jeanne de Heurles Laboras de Mezières Riccoboni, maiden name Laboras de Mezières

"If adversity purifies men, why not nations?" -

"If men had only temptations to great sins, they would always be good; but the daily fight with little ones accustoms them to defeat." -

"There are hosts of men, of the profoundest thought, who find nothing in the disclosures of science to shake their faith in the eternal virtues of reason and religion." - George Ripley

"It is not this earth, nor the men who inhabit it, nor the sphere of our legitimate activity, that we may not love; but the way in which the love is given, which constitutes worldliness." -

"The time men spend in trying to impress others they could spend in doing the things by which others would be impressed." - Frank Pierson, fully Frank Romer Pierson

"Do to others as you would have them do unto you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect indeed, but perhaps more useful: Do good to yourself with as little evil as possible to others." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things. Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Luxury, which cannot be prevented among men who are tenacious of their own convenience and of the respect paid them by others, soon completes the evil society had begun, and, under the pretense of giving bread to the poor, whom it should never have made such, impoverishes all the rest, and sooner or later depopulates the State." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau