Alexander Smith - Man Quotes

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A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Alexander Smith
Every man's road in life is marked by the grave of his personal likings.

Alexander Smith
If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

Alexander Smith
A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.

Alexander Smith
The soul of man is like the rolling world,
One half in day, the other dipt in night;
The one has music and the flying cloud,
The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

Alexander Smith
The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

Alexander Smith
Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

Alexander Smith
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

Alexander Smith
Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

Alexander Smith
A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.

Alexander Smith
And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

Alexander Smith
The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

Alexander Smith