“A man needs a friend not to flatter him, but to strengthen him at his weak points.”
E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor
Country Town Sayings [An anthology of witty sentences by the author] (1911), p81.
“What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”
1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)
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George Bernard Shaw413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. [1]
“He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
Context: But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born — a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun, that pour down the rain, and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator?
“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer
Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 2 “Palaces” (p. 79)
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters
5 September 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Il se flattait d'être sans préjugés, et cette prétention était à elle seule un gros préjugé.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
“Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who has been surrounded by flatterers since birth.”
Stendhal book The Charterhouse of Parma
La vanité piquée peut mener loin un jeune homme riche et dès le berceau toujours environné de flatteurs.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 13