Quotes About Circumstances

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

To make the society [which of course consists of non-workers] happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied. [3] What Mandeville

Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx, 1963)

One must force the frozen circumstances to dance, by singing to them their own melody.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony.

Remorse of conscience is like an old wound; a man is in no condition to fight under such circumstances. The pain abates his vigor and takes up too much of his attention.

The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in great danger of soon living beneath them; or as the Italian proverb says, "The man that lives by hope, will die by despair.

Fortune does not change men; it only unmasks them. [..by how they choose to react to it.]

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

I like the tradition of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances and how they react to events which force them to be heroic in a way that is not in their natures.

Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

It is usually more important how a man meets his fate than what it is.

Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.

There's place and means for every man alive.

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

Energy will do anything that can be done in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged animal a man without it.

The mark of a man is one who knows he can' control his circumstances - but he can control his responses.

Always blame conditions, not men

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.

Everything is valuable under the right conditions. To a man dying of thirst, water be more precious than gold. To a drowning man, water be of little worth and great trouble.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.