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For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.
-Woody Allen
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Man alone, during his brief existence on this earth, is free to examine, to know, to criticize, and to create. In this freedom lies his superiority over the forces that pervade his outward life. He is that unique organism in terms of matter and energy, space and time, which is urged to conscious purpose. Reason is his characteristic and indistinguishing principle. But man is only man -- and free -- when he considers himself as a total being in whom the unmediated whole of feeling and thought is not severed and who impugns any form of atomization as artificial, mischievous, and predatory.
-Ruth Nanda Anshen
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The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head.
-Margaret Atwood
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Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man--yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.
-Ghose Aurobindo
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Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.
-Arthur Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, being notes introductory to the study of theology, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., pp. 30-31, 1895
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Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
-Max Beerbohm
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The body is mortal, but the person dwelling in the body is immortal and immeasurable.
-Bhagavad Gita
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We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings--animals and plants--are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory beccause they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Dasein (literally being-the-there)...Man as man is present...in a manner wholly different from...inanimate things.
-Medard Boss, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology (xxix)
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The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
-Norman O. Brown
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... a total being who can do many different things - think, fight, remember, love, anticipate, copulate, sing, laugh, imagine. All the activities can be used for good ends, all can be abused and turned to evil ends.
-Robert McAfee Brown
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It's interesting, in light of Emerson's warning that faith cannot be created but must grow, that the seventh principle, which affirms our reverence for the interdependent web of all existence, was the one part of the purposes and principles that wasn't debated across the continent, that wasn't hammered out in a long and exhaustive process. I am told it came to the floor late in the Columbus, Ohio, General Assembly and it was unanimously accepted virtually without debate.
-David E. Bumbaugh
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
-William S. Burroughs
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When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
-Albert Camus, The Fall
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My skull, my eyes, my nose three times, my jaw, my shoulder, my chest, two fingers, a knee, everything from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. Listing what body parts he has broken
-Jackie Chan
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Why am I so determined to put the shoulder where it belongs? Women have very round shoulders that push forward slightly; this touches me and I say: One must not hide that! Then someone tells you: The shoulder is on the back. I've never seen women with shoulders on their backs.
-Coco Chanel
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I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.
-David Cronenberg
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The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
-Marquis De Sade
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I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.
-Eugene Delacroix
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I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?
-Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch character Leo Bulero, 1965
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Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.
-Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey
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Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and what is left, according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis. The penis is sensate; the penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity.
-Andrea Dworkin
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We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.
-Sir Arthur Eddington
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The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
-George Eliot
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But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
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It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.
-Epictetus
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Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with power to drag the soul to perdition.
-Eliza Farnham
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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
-William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm, 1950
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Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
-John Fletcher, Upon an
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I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!
-Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition (1952)
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Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is.
After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
-Victor Frankl
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I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
-Sigmund Freud
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The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris.
-Sigmund Freud
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Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.
-Erich Fromm, Man For Himself (New York: Rinehart and Company), 1947
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Man is a self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped, and electro-chemical reduction plant, integral with the segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent activation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries, millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems, crushers and cranes, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for seventy years if well managed, the whole extraordinary complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectroscope, etc. .. the turret control being closely allied with an air-conditioning intake and exhaust, and a main fuel intake.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller, A Definition of a Man
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He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility.
-Elizabeth Gaskell
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Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
-Andr, Journal
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Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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It takes more than just a good looking body. You've got to have the heart and soul to go with it.
-Lee Haney
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Many people treat their bodies as if they were rented from Hertz-something they are using to get around in but nothing they genuinely care about understanding.
-Chungliang Al Huang
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What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
-Aldous Huxley
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We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.
-W. R. [William Ralph] Inge
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The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
-Immanuel Kant
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It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.
-Walter Lippmann
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Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.
-St. Ignatius Loyola
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Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.
-Phyllis Mcginley
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When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.
-Margaret Mead
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Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing peace is the measure.
-George Melton
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Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
-H. L. Mencken
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Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
-Henry Miller
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The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.
-Thomas Arnold Mindell
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Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit; and is involved in both freedom and necessity.
-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume 1 Human Nature (Up-per Saddle River, New Jersey:Prentice Hall, 1964), 181
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The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.
-Roger Von Oech
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Man is the creature of circumstances.
-Robert Owen
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Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.
-Cynthia Ozick
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Anyone who considers himself in this way will be seized with terror and, discovering that the mass nature has given him supports itself between two abysses of infinity and nothingness, he will tremble in the face of these marvels; and I believe that as his curiosity changes to admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence then search them out with presumption.
For, finally, what is man in nature? He is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed.
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/PENSEES.HTM
-Blaise Pascal, Pens
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Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the Universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
-Blaise Pascal, Pens
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What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy. Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error: the pride and refuse of the universe.
-Blaise Pascal, Pens
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Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great.
-Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
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The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
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-John Renesch
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
-Adrienne Rich
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We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980
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What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!--and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delighteth not me...
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.
-Gloria Steinem
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure.
-Wallace Stevens
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An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating.
-Marie Carmichael Stopes
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Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
-Thomas Szasz
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The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
-Mark Twain, What Is Man?
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All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond this and that, where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao.
-Chuang Tzu
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Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?
-Source Unknown
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The human body is a peculiar device, pat it on the back and the head swells.
-Source Unknown
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Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
-Source Unknown
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
-John Updike
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There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
-Henry Van Dyke
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-Orson Welles
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It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one.
Know Thyself was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, Be Thyself shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply Be Thyself. That is the secret of Christ.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, "Fortnightly Review", February, 1891
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Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
-Thornton Wilder, attributed
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We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.
-Herman Wouk
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...by association with natures enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the 'Big Man' described by Yuan Tsi (A.D. 210-263), one of China's first romanticists, we 'live in heaven and earth as our house.'
-Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937
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Books about Mankind, Man
