Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.
You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.
Man is never perfect nor contented.
A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.
It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.
You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.
Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man's happiness really lies in contentment.
Revenge, lust, ambition, pride, and self-will are too often exalted as the gods of man's idolatry; while holiness, peace, contentment, and humility are viewed as unworthy of a serious thought.
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
The presidency made John Adams an old man long before there was television. As early as the nation's first contested presidential election, with Adams and Jefferson running to succeed Washington, you had a brutal, ugly, vicious campaign that was divisive and as partisan as anything we're experiencing today.
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.
A wise man, when he writes a book, sets forth his arguments fully and clearly; an enlightened ruler, when he makes his laws, sees to it that every contingency is provided for in detail.
That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.
Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
