James Fenimore Cooper - Man Quotes

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Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

James Fenimore Cooper
The air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each.

James Fenimore Cooper
We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.

James Fenimore Cooper
There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.

James Fenimore Cooper
The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.

James Fenimore Cooper
Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?

James Fenimore Cooper
Trust to HIM. There are days in which the sun is not seen—when a lurid darkness brings a second night over the earth. It matters not. The great luminary is always there. There may be clouds before his face, but the winds will blow them away. The man or the people that trust in God will find a lake for every See-wise.

James Fenimore Cooper
All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.

James Fenimore Cooper
Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken.

James Fenimore Cooper
God has given the salt lick to the deer; and He has given to man, red-skin and white, the delicious spring at which to slake his thirst.

James Fenimore Cooper
They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that 'one man is as good as another;' a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.

James Fenimore Cooper
How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!

James Fenimore Cooper
Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.

James Fenimore Cooper