The Reasonable Man Quotes

#1. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

#2. When is it safe to invest?' there are two answers ...
1. Never!
2. Always!
'Never for' the crowd... 'Always' for the reasonable man; for it all depends upon what you call 'safe,' in a world peopled by fallible human beings.

Kenneth L. Fisher

#3. The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure-the figure of 'The Reasonable Man'.

A.P. Herbert

#4. I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days that is worth dying for. But dying against - there's enough iniquity in Europe to carry the most urbane or decadent into battle.

Geoffrey Household

#5. The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

#6. I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

Andre Breton

#7. It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men
more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

Beryl Markham

#8. At the very moment when the world seems to break up we still take it seriously and perform reasonable acts and undertakings, the condemned man still drinks his glass of rum. To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognize the sincerity of hunger and thirst

Emmanuel Levinas

#9. The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.

Jean Genet

#10. It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

D.H. Lawrence

#11. Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.

Washington Irving

#12. We are blessed with a faith, which calls into action the whole intellectual man; which prescribes a reasonable service; which challenges the investigation of its evidences; and which, in the doctrine of immortality, invests the mind of man with a portion of the dignity of Divine intelligence.

Edward Everett

#13. I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men - while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror?

Thomas Mann

#14. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.

Rene Girard

#15. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt?

Henry David Thoreau

#16. When a dead man knocks on the car window, I think fainting is a reasonable response.

Marjorie F. Baldwin

#17. No administration could stop the tidal wave of immigration that swept over the land; no political party could restrain or control the enterprise of our people, and no reasonable man could desire to check the march of civilization.

Nelson A. Miles

#18. A whole castle full of damsels intent upon securing a husband?" Wesley mimicked in surprise. "Why, of course. What reasonable man would not be thrilled with such a prospect?"

-Wesley

Katharine Ashe

#19. He who is discontented with what he has, and with what has been granted to him by fortune, is one who is ignorant of the art of living, but he who bears that in a noble spirit, and makes reasonable use of all that comes from it, deserves to be regarded as a good man.

Epictetus

#20. It does not, surely, require such torrents of blood to satisfy any reasonable man that nothing can be a more impious presumption than for either side to think themselves entitled to count the Almighty as an ally in such a pitiful display of human passion.

James L. Petigru

#21. It is hard to fight desire; but to control it is the sign of a reasonable man.

Democritus

#22. Finally," Lilith said, smiling warmly at her. "A reasonable angel."
"I'm no angel," Eleanore quietly insisted.
"Yes, you are," said every man in the room.

Heather Killough-Walden

#23. Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

Albert Einstein

#24. The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

Soren Kierkegaard

#25. Liberty! Man has no liberty except the liberty to obey rules, but who makes the rules? With luck, Kate, it will be reasonable men making reasonable rules.

Bernard Cornwell

#26. And yet on the other hand unless warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image, but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.

John Milton

#27. All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers ... only the basic theory is wrong. But that's the last thing he will want to admit.

Louis L'Amour

#28. Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man.

Arthur Eddington

#29. It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

Robert Graves

#31. More often than not, in order to find truth, a wise man must suffer the ravings of the insane. There is no undiscovered truth to be found in the minds of the reasonable and rational.

Derek R. Audette

#32. If a man loses one-third of his skin he dies; if a tree loses one-third of its bark, it too dies. If the Earth is a 'sentient being', would it not be reasonable to expect that if it loses one-third of its trees and vegetable covering, it will also die?

Richard St. Barbe Baker

#33. The ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man.

Friedrich Hayek

#34. Christianity claims that the supernatural is as reasonable as the natural, that man himself is supernatural as truly as he is natural, and that the Bible is so clearly the word of God by proofs that are unanswerable, that it is unreasonable to disbelieve its divine truths.

Abbott Eliot Kittredge

#35. You sound so reasonable for a man who's been jilted. Can't you sound a bit angry? You just lost the best sex of your life. Punch a wall or something!

Bronwyn Scott

#36. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

George Gordon Byron

#37. The essential tendency of life is toward happiness ... Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

Phillips Brooks

#38. The happiest time in a man's life is when he is in the red hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it.

Josh Billings

#39. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence

Bertrand Russell

#40. To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.

Thomas Huxley

#41. It is time for us now as a nation to exercise the same reasonable foresight in dealing with our great natural resources that would be shown by any prudent man in conserving and widely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his children.

Theodore Roosevelt

#42. Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

Hans Arp

#43. It is perfectly reasonable to despair of a world where the Nobel Committee gives the Peace Prize to a man running a war.

Martin Firrell

#44. If there is one thing that the average woman detests more than another, it is an entirely reasonable man.

R. Austin Freeman

#45. It is not reasonable that he who does not shoot should hit the mark, nor that he who does not stand fast at his post should win the day, or that the helpless man should succeed or the coward prosper.

Plutarch

#46. Truly, a command of gall cannot be obeyed like one of sugar. A man must require just and reasonable things; if he would see the scales of obedience properly trimmed. From orders which are improper, springs resistance, which is not easily overcome.

Giambattista Basile

#47. 'Let's Get Harry' was where I met Bob Singer and worked with him for the first time, and then 'Reasonable Doubts' was the second time, and there was a thing after that called 'Charlie Grace' that was the third time. I liked working with Bob. A nice man and a good partner.

Mark Harmon

#48. In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

John Wyndham

#49. Man, being made reasonable, and so a thinking creature, there is nothing more worthy of his being than the right direction and employment of his thoughts; since upon this depends both his usefulness to the public, and his own present and future benefit in all respects.

William Penn

#50. A reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable people.

Confucius

#51. What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilisation concerns man's behaviour to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

Edward Mayhew

#52. It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, while the wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it.

Gore Vidal

#53. It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.

Wallace Stegner

#54. No reasonable man, much less a Christian, can or should take part in the efforts of Communists and Socialists

C.F.W. Walther

#55. While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

H.G.Wells

#56. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?

Alexander Hamilton

#57. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Emile M. Cioran

#58. The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no
opinion about things I don't understand.

Gertrude Stein

#59. Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

Adam Gopnik

#60. Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Bertrand Russell

#61. Democracy is the superior form of government, because it is based on a respect for man as a reasonable being.

John F. Kennedy

#62. I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,
his manners, his mien, his exterior,
that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him
rarely in his mind.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#63. I am glad that at such a moment my young man turned out to be not so reasonable; the time will come for an intelligent man to be reasonable, but if at such an exceptional moment there is no love to be found in a young man's heart, then when will it come?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky