“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and
he will become as he can and should be.”
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
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Stephen R. Covey 125
American educator, author, businessman and motivational spe… 1932–2012Related quotes
“You can always tell how a man will treat his wife by the way he treats his mother.”
Source: How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend
“You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.”
“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”
Source: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
“Treat a child as though he already is the person he's capable of becoming.”
Quoted in Gently And Firmly By C.P. Varkey, p. 87
“5335. Two things a Man should never be angry at; what he can help, and what he cannot help.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.