A Quote by Alexis de Tocqueville

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste that all men have for easy success and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in others.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Quote Topics

Characteristics Democratic Easy Enjoyment Intellect Men Occurs Others Period Present Success Taste Well

Quote Author

Alexis de Tocqueville
French - Historian
July 29, 1805 - April 16, 1859

Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.

Robert M. Hutchins

You can cultivate taste, as you can the intellect. Full understanding whets the appetite and desire, and, later, sharpens the enjoyment of possession.

Baltasar Gracian

Sometimes, Ms. Lane," he said, "one must break with one's past to embrace one's future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is.

Karen Marie Moning

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

Leonardo da Vinci

Democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back.

Alexis de Tocqueville

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.

Orson F. Whitney

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.

Henry David Thoreau

In all pursuits men complain of failure when they have not attained the measure of success they proposed to themselves.

Charles Tomlinson

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.

Jean de la Bruyere

To enjoy yourself is the easy method to give enjoyment to others.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning.