James Boswell Men Quotations

I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything....

People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge "what manner of person he is." I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal.

I have seen many a bear led by a man: but I never before saw a man led by a bear.

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.

It is not every man who can be exquisitely miserable, any more than exquisitely happy.

Why should not the knowledge, the skill, the expertness, the assiduity, and the spirited hazards of trade and commerce, when crowned with success, be entitled to give those flattering distinctions by which mankind are so universally captivated? Such are the specious, but false arguments for a proposition which always will find numerous advocates, in a nation where men are every day starting up from obscurity to wealth. To refute them is needless. The general sense of mankind cries out, with irresistible force, "Un gentilhomme est toujours gentilhomme.

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?

If a man who is born to a fortune cannot make himself easier and freer than those who are not, he gains nothing.

The scent of Sloth tempts a smug man.

What a curious creature is man; with what a variety of powers and faculties is he endued; yet how easily is he disturbed and put out of order.

When a man is familiar with many people he must expect many disagreeable familiarizations.

A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others. Sometimes it does. But the danger is, that while a man grows better pleased with himself, he may be growing less pleasing to others. Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has presented.

[A]s a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.

All censure of a man's self is oblique praise.

A Sceptick therefore, who because he finds that Truths are not universally received, doubts of their existence, is just as foolish as a man who should try large shoes upon little feet, and little shoes upon large feet, and finding that they did not fit.

The man who stops making new friends eventually will have none.

Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials.

To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.

I argued that the chastity of women was of much more consequence than that of men, as the property and rights of families depend upon it.

When we know exactly all a man's views and how he comes to speak and act so and so, we lose any respect for him, though we may love and admire him.

If a man is prodigal, he cannot be truly generous.

But the question is, whether the animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds for the service and entertainment of man, would accept existence upon the terms on which they have it.