Top 91 Plain Man Quotes
#1. Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.
William Wilberforce
#3. Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family
the monkey.
Leo Tolstoy
#4. Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.
Winston S. Churchill
#5. I am a plain man, and I care and know comparatively little about rhetoric.
Gerrit Smith
#6. The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
Ernst Mach
#8. Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.
Victor Hugo
#9. Make sure you marry a plain man, Tessa. They won't stray, and they'll never have power over you.
Richelle Mead
#10. The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly.
John Barth
#11. Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily; for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.
Lord Chesterfield
#12. Religion holds a man back from the path, prevents his stepping forward, for various very plain reasons. First, it makes the vital mistake of distinguishing between good and evil.
Mabel Collins
#13. Religion is like the fashion, one man wears his doublet slashed, another lashed, another plain; but every man has a doublet; so every man has a religion. We differ about the trimming.
John Selden
#14. The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.
William Blake
#15. See here, son, I am not a pessimistic man. I am just plain optimistic that the worst will prevail. That there is Sam's law, son." John
S.E. Swapp
#16. In our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man.
Christopher Fry
#17. Yes, that man acted ugly," she told us in plain English. "But throwing more ugliness back at him ain't the answer.
Lauren Myracle
#19. Now as I look around, it's mighty plain to see,
This world is such a great and a funny place to be.
Oh, the gamblin' man is rich, an' the workin' man is poor,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.
Woody Guthrie
#20. I wanted to see if the American man in plain brown pants and a bare torso could speak profound things.
Ted Shawn
#21. When money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
Flann O'Brien
#22. She nodded, looking down at the small wooden bird, a plain thing carved by a great man who'd always taken pleasure in creating things with his own hands. She's telling me, I think, that I should seek to be none other than myself, and so fly always like the bird that I was born to be.
Susanna Kearsley
#23. The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it.
Stephen Crane
#24. A man may forgive many wrongs, but he cannot easily forgive anyone who makes it plain that his conversation is tedious.
Stevie Smith
#25. The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
James Russell Lowell
#26. To my mind, the best investment a young man starting out in business can possibly make is to give all his time, all his energies, to work - just plain, hard work.
Charles M. Schwab
#27. I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.
H.L. Mencken
#28. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain. Alina was the lucky one. Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering.
Karen Marie Moning
#29. One grows to the belief that, while woman's glory is in her hair, man's glory is to defeat some one. And if he can 'defeat with great slaughter' his monument is twice as high as if he had only visited on his brother man a plain undoing.
Elbert Hubbard
#30. It's a pity you are so poor & plain. And a shame you have such intelligence & spirit, Miss Middleton. You might otherwise make a man an acceptable spouse.
M.R.C. Kasasian
#31. Sometimes I think man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished. Instead of the truth, which is that he's just another animal on the plain. A smart one, but just another animal.
Michael Crichton
#32. Speak both in the senate and to every man, whoever he may be, appropriately, not with any affectation: use plain discourse.
Various
#33. All women, from the countess to the cook-maid, are put into high good humor with themselves when a man is taken with them at firstsight. And be they ever so plain, they will find twenty good reasons to defend the judgment of such a man.
Samuel Richardson
#34. As you love your peace, Christian, be plain-hearted with God and man, and keep the king's highway.
William Gurnall
#35. There is nothing more important than being a man, just a plain, ordinary, human man. I know you think Spartacus is something more than a man. He isn't. If he were, then he wouldn't be any good at all.
There is no great mystery about Spartacus.
Howard Fast
#36. The mind of man has no defense To equal plain, old common sense. This homely virtue don't despise, If you would be happy as well as wise.
Don Herold
#37. As much as Jason hated the man, it was plain to see how Sloan had built the empire he had. Perseverance, dedication and hard work. Along with an appalling lack of ethics and a healthy does of gray magic.
Kristen Painter
#38. The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.
Eve Ensler
#39. When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Richard Steele
#40. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to makea malefactordiesweetly was only belonging toher husband.
John Dryden
#41. Happiness is a myth we seek,
If manifested surely irks;
Like river speeding to the plain,
On its arrival slows and murks.
For man is happy only in
His aspiration to the heights;
When he attains his goal, he cools
And longs for other distant flights.
Khalil Gibran
#42. Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
George Carlin
#43. If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I'd store up no virtue For Heaven's distant plain, I'd live at ease as I did please And sin once again.
Robert Graves
#44. It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n.
Alexander Pope
#46. I'm not the Ambassador," said Crosby. "I wish I was, but I'm just a plain, ordinary business man.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#48. A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such.
Samuel Butler
#49. Sincerity is like traveling on a plain, beaten road, which commonly brings a man sooner to his journey's end than by-ways, in which men often lose themselves.
John Tillotson
#50. Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind
Thomas Huxley
#51. He says he thanks every star the we existed on the same clestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man made throughaway for intersecting dreams.
Emma Forrest
#52. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?
Virginia Woolf
#53. The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
William Osler
#54. Werewolves? Oh please, just plain stupid. Who wants to get it on with a man ruled by his inner dog?
Karen Marie Moning
#55. THIS dust was once the Man, / Gentle, plain, just and resolute - under whose cautious hand, / Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, / Was saved the Union of These States.
Walt Whitman
#56. On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.
Emile Zola
#57. I'm a copper," he said. "Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
Raymond Chandler
#58. So what if you're plain? Anyone can like a beautiful woman or a handsome man. That's easy. But power is the ability to inspire attraction without the obvious.
Donna Lynn Hope
#59. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
Oscar Wilde
#60. My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.
Charles M. Blow
#61. Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work.
Susan Vreeland
#62. I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.
Oliver Cromwell
#63. When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
Flann O'Brien
#64. The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.
J. Budziszewski
#65. The good man is he for whom, because he is virtuous, the things that are absolutely good are good; it is also plain that his use of these goods must be virtuous and in the absolute sense good.
Aristotle.
#66. Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God either, and it is an easily observable fact that for countless numbers of persons the change from no-faith to faith makes no actual difference in the life.
Kevin DeYoung
#67. It says in the Bible, in plain words, that God made a self-portrait. He created man in His own image - man and woman - for God is Love.Why should we start thinking of a god up in the clouds with wings, if He dwells within us in the spirit of Love?!
Thor Heyerdahl
#68. And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.
Kahlil Gibran
#69. We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.
Emma Forrest
#70. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate.
Barack Obama
#71. The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points
his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.
Thomas Paine
#72. Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.
Sarah Waters
#73. A young man should ask himself not if it is his duty to go to the heathen, but if he may dare stay at home. The command is so plain: "Go."
Lottie Moon
#74. No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.
Colson Whitehead
#75. A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
Oscar Wilde
#76. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
James G. Frazer
#77. Regular readers will know I'm a fan of (Cristiano) Ronaldo, and an even bigger fan of the man who's assumed his mantle with quite astonishing success, Wayne Rooney. But Messi is on a higher plain than even that pair.
Andy Cole
#78. Like sweet morning dew
I took one look at you
And it was plain to see
You were my destiny
Method Man
#79. The most consistent thing about Graham Wessit was his attitude of open experiment. Can you even imagine , she asked herself, plain, quiet, intellectual little you spending a lifetime on the arm of such a havoc-producing man?
Judith Ivory
#80. The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I'm being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.
Jane Smiley
#81. The why is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob; if not,
The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd
Even by the squand'ring glances of the fool.
William Shakespeare
#82. The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.
J.B. Priestley
#83. Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#84. When I saw several thugs attack a lone man, or a larger man a small one, or even when a mastiff attacked a toy Pomeranian, not virtue but plain disgust upset my insides. This early variety of defeatism later became an obsolete trait - damaging me in today's world.
Ernst Junger
#85. I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.
Sue Monk Kidd
#86. And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
Jacob Bronowski
#87. This provision (the 4th Amendment) speaks for itself. Its plain object is to secure the perfect enjoyment of that great right of the common law, that a man's house shall be his own castle, privileged against all civil and military intrusion.
Joseph Story
#88. Women love having a man in the store. She tries on a dress and I tell her to turn around so I can get the full effect. Or she likes a skirt but she thinks maybe the blouse is too plain. So I grab a scarf and drape it around her neck. That personal attention means everything.
M.R. Cornelius
#89. Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
Matthew Arnold
#90. Provide for her Future - if you can! - That's my motto! - But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past!
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
#91. The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach: The Ogre cannot master speech. About a subjugated plain, Among it's desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
W. H. Auden
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