Bill Vaughan Men Quotations

I retire to make way for an abler man. In my four years as attorney general I have aged about ten years, but when I have get back to the practice of law, I hope to show those lawyers that I still have some vitality left.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.

In adversity man is saved by hope.

There is that in the soul of man which must respond to the highest in virtue. It may not respond at once. Human nature can easily be over-faced by examples too remote and austere. Moreover, human nature can easily deny God because the whole race has long been in rebellion against Him. Yet there is that in human nature which calls out to the supreme examples of virtue: owns, as it were, the intention of God who made it, and feels the unmistakable homesickness of the soul.

Above all, we must abolish hope in the heart of man. A calm despair, without angry convulsions, without reproaches to Heaven, is the essence of wisdom.

Calamity was ordained for man.

Man has learned to fly like the birds. Now all he has to do is work out how to do it quietly.

One learned gentleman, "a sage grave man," Talk'd of the Ghost in Hamlet, "sheath'd in steel"— His well-read friend, who next to speak began, Said, "That was poetry, and nothing real;" A third, of more extensive learning, ran To Sir George Villiers' Ghost, and Mrs. Veal; Of sheeted Spectres spoke with shorten'd breath, And thrice he quoted Drelincourt on Death.

How, frequently, some murder'd man appear'd, To tell his wife and children who had done it...

As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers: nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow.

The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature-nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.

A learned man is a tank; a wiser man is a spring.

By the age of twenty, any young man should know whether or not he is to be a specialist and just where his tastes lie. By postponing the question we have set on immaturity a premium which controls most American personality to its deathbed.

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

...the story of a man who saw three fellows laying bricks at a new building: He approached the first and asked, What are you doing? Clearly irritated, the first man responded, What the heck do you think I'm doing? I'm laying these darn bricks! He then walked over to the second bricklayer and asked the same question. The second fellow responded, Oh, I'm making a living. He approached the third bricklayer with the same question, What are you doing? The third looked up, smiled and said, I'm building a cathedral. At the end of the day, who feels better about how he's spent his last eight hours?

Had but my deeds been like my words, ah, then I had been numbered too with holy men.

There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences.

Pouter, tumbler, and fantail are from the same source; The racer and hack may be traced to one Horse; So men were developed from monkeys of course, Which nobody can deny.

But at the same time I went down into the mines with working miners who are still young men, younger than I am, who are aware that their working life is coming to an end and they feel suddenly cut off.

Goal achievement is hero's work.

The man who is always talking about being a gentleman, never is one.

The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water; they mirror themselves in still water.

Every man seeks the truth, but God only knows who has found it.

Every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other.

A covetous man's penny is a stone.

The mind of a wise man is the safest custody of secrets; cheerfulness is the key to friendship; patience and forbearance will conceal many defects.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenceless!

How men hate waiting while their wives shop for clothes and trinkets; how women hate waiting, often for much of their lives, while their husbands shop for fame and glory.

Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.

A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.

Men are more like the time they live in than they are like their fathers.