Alexander Smith Men Quotations

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

Every man's road in life is marked by the grave of his personal likings.

I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.

To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.

Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.

Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.