Benjamin Haydon Men Quotations

When a man is no longer anxious to do better than well, he is done for.

Men who have reached and passed 45, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness!

Men of genius are often considered superstitious, but the fact is, the fineness of their nerve renders them more alive to the supernatural than ordinary men.

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

The longer a man lives in this world the more he must be convinced that all domestic quarrels had better never be obtruded on the public; for, let the husband be right, or let him be wrong, there is always a sympathy existing for women which is certain to give the man the worst of it.

To procrastinate seems inherent in man, for if you do to-day that you may enjoy to-morrow it is but deferring the enjoyment; so that to be idle or industrious, vicious or virtuous, is but with a view of procrastinating the one or the other.

No man, perhaps, is so wicked as to commit evil for its own sake. Evil is generally committed under the hope of some advantage the pursuit of virtue seldom obtains. Yet the most successful result of the most virtuous heroism is never without its alloy.

If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainty of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be.