Quotes
Quotes about Man
Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.
"Arms, and the man I sing, who forc'ed by Fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting Hate; Expell'ed and exil'd, left the Trojan Shoar: Long Labours, both by Sea and Land he bore; And in the doubtful War, before he won, the Latian realm, and built the destin'd Town: His banish'd gods restor'd to Rites Divine, and setl'd sure Succession in his line: From Whence the Race of Alban Fathers come, and the long Glories of Majestick Rome."
"Sleep'st thou, O Goddess born! and cans't thou drown thy needful cares, so near a Hostile town? ... Who knows what Hazards thy Delay may bring? Woman's a various and a changeful thing."-Mercury to Aeneas
"But, Rome, 'tis alone, with awful sway, to rule Mankind; and make the world obey; Disposing peace, and War, thy own Majestick Way. To tame the Proud, the fetter'd Slave to free; These are Imperial Arts, and worthy thee." -Anchises to Aeneas in the Underworld
The creation of a human community in fiction is the closest the novelist can get to the creation of a cosmos
Every man yearns for immortality
No society, whether human or animal, can exist without communication.
We can feel strongly for primitive man in the dark; for all our science, we have not fully overcome our fear of it or, when human contact is lost, our sense of devastating loneliness in it
A horse is as it were an extension of man, ergo part of him. We are all centaurs.
He had got death over with, then. He was, in a sense, lucky. Perhaps posthumous life was better than the real thing. Oh God, yes, I remember Enderby, what a man. Eater, drinker, wencher, and such exotic adventures. You could go on living without all the trouble of still being alive. Your character got blurred and mingled with those of other dead men, wittier, handsomer, themselves more vital now that they were dead. And there was oneâs work, good or bad, but still a death-cheater. It wasnât death that was the that was the trouble, of course, it was dying.
The important thing is to get yourself born. Youâre entitled to that. But youâre not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.
If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. Youâve got to have things to choose between, and that means good and evil. If you donât choose, youâre not human anymore. Youâre something else. Or youâre dead.
Do you deny that Godâs incredible benison was to make man free, if he wished, to offend him? That no greater love is conceivable than to leave the creature free to hate the creator.
Because we were too intellectual and clever and humanistic to believe in a hell didnât mean that a hell couldnât exist.
The precise date of your dispatch, the precise allotment of paradisal or infernal space awaiting you. Would you diminish the Allknowing by making man free?
Human beings are defined by freedom of choice. Once you have them doing what theyre told is good just because theyre going to get a lump of sugar instead of a kick up the ahss (?!) then ethnics no longer exists. The state could tell them it was good to go off and mug and rape and kill some other nation.
He thinks man is being abolished. His kind of man.
Man is much more than a dog but, like a dog, he is within range of scientific analysis
It was a matter of being integer vitae and also of having committed himself to a world in which pure and simple aggression was to be accepted as part of the human fabric.
The autobiographer can see himself as the only true historian in the sense that he is presenting the life of perennial humanity. In the narrower sense, he provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time.
Some men's sexual limit is the pit. Its rage can find a counterpart in how they mangle, tear and rape their art.
Human pain meant but little in the Gulf War's visual grammar, a big feast of death to feed the cinecamera.
For we know the world to exist only by our seeing it. You shut eyes in a man's death and in a sense you kill the universe
Dreams are strange. A man can wake sweating in terror. What is that dark country of the mind through which we wander in sleep?
