Adam Ferguson Quotes

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. Events which excite those feelings will produce wonderful effects.

Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their original natures.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can.

Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.

There is the churning and the boiling of the sea, and the foam on top of it and that is what man is, churning and foam together.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.

Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent.

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

To discover the true principles of Morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: They have need only of common sense.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.