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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken
Related topics: Cynical
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie.
I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- H.L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion,
but only in the sense and to the extent
that we respect his theory that
his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that
after all God will not help him
- H. L. Mencken
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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that
they try to make us think as they do,
but that they try to make us do as they think.
- H. L. Mencken
Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
- H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief
in the occurrence of the improbable.
- H. L. Mencken
The worst government is often the most moral.
One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.
But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
- H. L. Mencken
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- H. L. Mencken
For centuries, theologians have been explaining
the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken
For every complex problem,
there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H.L. Mencken
Marriage is a wonderful institution,
but who would want to live in an institution?
- H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- H. L. Mencken
The urge to save humanity is almost always
a false front for the urge to rule.
- H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband
a month before she marries him
and what she thinks of him a year afterward,
and you will have the truth about him.
- H. L. Mencken
Morality is the theory that every human act
must be either right or wrong,
and that 99 % of them are wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
- H. L. Mencken
Puritanism. The haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H. L. Mencken
The believing mind is eternally impervious to evidence.
- H. L. Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing.
- Oscar Wilde
The believer's ray of light is the cynic's sunburn.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Talent is God-given; be humble.
Fame is man-given; be thankful.
Conceit is self-given; be careful.
- John Wooden
All things share the same breath -
the beast, the tree, the man...
the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
- Chief Seattle (attributed)
No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot
The full measure of a man is
not to be found in the man himself,
but in the colors and textures that
come alive in others because of him.
- Albert Schweitzer
Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde
The wise man in the storm prays God,
not for safety from danger,
but for deliverance from fear.
It is the storm within which endangers him,
not the storm without.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The wise man does not lay up his own treasures.
The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.
- Lao Tzu
Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.
- Mark Twain
The man who has no imagination has no wings.
- Muhammad Ali
Nothing can stop the man with the right
mental attitude from achieving his goal;
nothing on earth can help the man
with the wrong mental attitude.
- Thomas Jefferson
If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Each man is the architect of his own fate.
- Appius Claudius
As long as a man stands in his own way,
everything seems to be in his way.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
- George Savile
When the tempest rages, when the thunders roar,
and the lightnings blaze around us
it is then that the truly brave man stands firm at his post.
- Luther Martin
If the stars should appear
but one night every thousand years
how man would marvel and stare.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
During the first period of a man's life
the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
- Soren Kierkegaard
I wept because I had no shoes
until I met a man who had no feet.
- old Persian Proverb
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear,
but the triumph over it.
The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid,
but he who conquers that fear.
- Nelson Mandela
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was:
"If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"
But... the good Samaritan reversed the question:
"If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Circumstance does not make the man: it reveals him to himself.
- James Allen
It is what a man thinks of himself
that really determines his fate.
- Henry David Thoreau
For man with no forgiveness in heart,
life worse punishment than death.
- Miyagi: character in the movie Karate Kid 2
One man with courage makes a majority.
- old saying probably repeated by Andrew Jackson
(falsely attributed to Jefferson)
A man can do only what he can do.
But if he does that each day he can sleep at night
and do it again the next day.
- Albert Schweitzer
The fear of death follows from the fear of life.
A man who lives fully, is prepared to die at any time.
- Mark Twain
An honest man is always a child.
- Socrates
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth,
and if a man does not know what a thing is,
it is at least an increase in knowledge
if he knows what it is not.
- Carl Jung
Every man must decide whether he will
walk in the light of creative altruism
or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands,
that goes to his head.
If you talk to him in his language,
that goes to his heart.
- Nelson Mandela
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
- William Shakespeare
The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man
are fixed upon the same creation;
but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
- Albert Pike
Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.
- Albert Schweitzer
Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.
- the movie Braveheart
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
- Benjamin Franklin
Take a chance! All life is a chance.
The man who goes farthest is generally
the one who is willing to do and dare.
- Dale Carnegie
A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
- Seneca
Dear Father in heaven, I'm not a praying man,
but if you're up there and you can hear me ...
show me the way... show me the way.
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946 movie)
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man,
but he is brave five minutes longer.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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