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Quotations about Humankind
I think that mentally and biologically, if not in physical form, man has been changing for at least the last two thousand years and that now he is changing very rapidly indeed. This New Adam, Homo rampant... is dawning upon us...
Alas! it is hard to be human! ~George M. P. Baird, "The Theft of Thistledown: A Faery Interlude," 1915
Child of Heaven! Born from the womb of a star! ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Of late, human nature has suffered many disgraces. We are more fully aware of our humble status in the universe, of our nearer kinship to the apes than to the angels, and of the gruesome history of our species on this planet. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, A Treasury of English Aphorisms, 1928
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on "treasons, stratagems and spoils" — of importance only within four walls. A tame animal — in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose. ~Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), diary, 1950, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Markings, 1964
Good I may occasionally be; wicked I shall certainly be, for are not we all born in iniquity? ~Kate Trimble Sharber (b.1883), At the Age of Eve, 1911
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that the human race has invented a whole tragedy for itself and has allotted the leading role. ~Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
I mean, look at the world now. Look at the way we're treating each other. Look at the way we're talking to each other. We don't want to have a discourse anymore, we want to have an argument. We want to find reasons to hate each other. I can't deal perfectly with the violence in myself. I don't think anybody can, I don't think a Dalai Lama can. I think that our survival as a species depends on some kind of evolution about that. We can't go on behaving like this and last for very long. ~W.S. Merwin, Lannan Foundation Readings & Conversations event with Michael Silverblatt, 2012
Lordy, Lordy, what an odd creature man is! ~Flora Annie Webster Steel (1847–1929), "For the Faith"
...humanity has itself largely by the throat... ~William Ellis, 1899
Much of what we are is of the weave of other generations and cannot be changed. Who, among the puny animals called men, fretting in the cogs of the centuries, can turn back the world and fix for himself a softer nest? ~Ellsworth R. Bathrick (1863–1917), "Don't Worry Book," 1909, as quoted by Mill Supplies, 1915
Residual sin: you can take mankind out of the muck of its past — but never the muck out of mankind. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
When in the dim beginning of the years,
God mixed in man the raptures and the tears
And scattered thru his brain the starry stuff,
He said, "Behold! Yet this is not enough..."
~Edwin Markham, "Man-Test," The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913
We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound? ~Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind, 1921
We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
The human will, vacillating and chameleon-hued, is in continual combat between truth and error, virtue and vice, life and death. ~William Armstrong Fairburn, Mentality and Freedom, 1917
How, at every age, people like doing what they ought not! No matter what their position, what their sex, all are alike; there is an inexpressible pleasure in doing what is forbidden. ~Anonymous, Will is the Cause of Woe, 1878
Under fairly stable conditions all species of sentient creature should, generation by generation, be getting happier. But nowadays change is no longer gradual and we are in such a state of stress as no life has ever encountered before. Man in the last few score thousand years has been changing his conditions with an increasing violence and throwing not only himself but incidentally most other surviving mammals out of gear. God knows what man hasn't thrown out of gear in the past hundred years. Man is a biological catastrophe. Hence now, in this age, in this particular epoch in the history of living creatures, we have a monstrous amount of misfitting... We harry all life.
Human nature has not changed. But it is used as the great
There is ineradicable goodness in human nature. ~The Dean of Manchester (The Very Rev. J. G. M'Cormick, D.D.), "Cabbage Planting," 1922
Human beings cannot be persuaded to regard themselves as mere natural phenomena. It is an alluring thought that the true, the beautiful and the good are merely embodiments of a single idea, but it is a thought which makes little appeal to a man with an ulcerated tooth. We go on nailing up the scaffolding of our joint temple to Goodness, Beauty and Truth until a hammer hits our own thumb, and our enthusiasm for this kind of architecture rapidly wanes. If, then, by common consent we agree to segregate the natural from the social sciences it is because stars and electrons and chromosomes do not bring us so near to the quick of human feeling as religion and society and man. ~Gilbert Newton Lewis, The Anatomy of Science, 1926
In each generation the human mind in every man reverts to its starting-point; each new man is a primitive man. ~Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
Within us there is a living spark of the divine man. Smother it as we may, it will some time set our souls on fire... ~Alwyn M. Thurber, Quaint Crippen, 1896
Jack sighed. "People are pretty stupid, aren't they, Dad?"
"I wouldn't say that, son. Remember, we're people ourselves."
~Gerald Raftery (1905-1986), Twenty-Dollar Horse, 1955
Man was nature's mistake — she neglected to finish him — and she has never ceased paying for her mistake. For it was in the process of finishing himself that man got out from underneath nature's inexorable laws, and became her most formidable adversary. ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973
Give him time — and he does not need nearly so much time as an animal because his adjustments are mental and not organic — give him time and man will reconcile himself to the most astonishing changes in his conditions. Nevertheless, some time is needed, and at present the conditions of human life are changing so rapidly as to outpace his utmost adaptability. His knowledge and power increase faster than the wisdom of his conduct.
All kinds of men, herculean, obstinate, petty, profound — men of oak and men of wax — meet you at every move, crowding and jostling through the by-ways of the world. ~Mose Velsor (Walt Whitman), "Manly Health and Training," New York Atlas, 1858 October 10th
Men of Earth, how goes our race?
Runners on a whirling ball...
~Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968), "En Route"
...the sight of my dog, his whole length prone upon the ground, his outstretched forepaws clasped upon the bone as eagerly as a miser clutches his gold, and the very dog-soul of him as intent upon his task as if life depended upon his finding some shred of gristle, some morsel of meat, upon a knuckle-end that his teeth have already scraped and planed to the whiteness and cleanness of polished ivory.
Perhaps it is that seeing him thus — his jaw distended to the point of dislocation in an impotent effort to compass the circumference of a huge shinbone, or else making of the same jaws a pair of nutcrackers to scrunch wickedly at some marrow-end, hard enough, one would think to splinter every tooth in his head — reminds me of the way in which we human beings strain every nerve, break our hearts almost, to compass some trivial end, some twopenny triumph as barren of real worth to ourselves or to others as are the dog's gnawing and worrying of the meatless bone. ~Coulson Kernahan, "A Dog in the Pulpit," 1909
For my part, I am not so sure at bottom that man is, as he says, the king of nature; he is far more its devastating tyrant. I believe he has many things to learn from animal societies, older than his own and of infinite variety. ~Romain Rolland
[We are] in the midst of a material and sick world... More than ever, man needs spiritual nourishment. ~Ernest Bloch, 1921
First cosmogony emerged, the world which Christian ignorance had stamped upon and flattened out was rolled up again and measured and the stars were set back in their places, then as biology developed, that absurd story of Adam and his irascible Creator faded out, the fires of hell sank and the Fall lost its date, and now in the interpretation of history and our standards of conduct we free our minds from its last lingering obsessions with that great misconception of life. Ethical concepts are being reconstructed. Our manners improve. We control and allay our fretfulness. We get new ideas of what our 'selves' are, and realize the hallucinations of egotism.
Humanity is the refuse of spirit. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Amazing anchorite,
Sick god,
Why were you an arrow of longing for the Superman?
Not even Man is here:
Children in masks and savages with manners
Is all that we are—
We are striving to be—human…
And even—all-too-human…
You ask for a Superman?
First then produce—a Man.
~James Oppenheim, "To Nietzsche," War and Laughter, 1916
Human beings are generally considered a higher form, though there are times when I have my doubts. ~Cid Ricketts Sumner, Tammy Out of Time, 1958
Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world, — whose goodness lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon subside, and leave them upon the old level of desire.
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. ~Joseph Baretti, quoted by James Boswell, 1766, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson [samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html] (Thanks, Frank Lynch!)
Man is not himself only... He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources, half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that lies too deep for naming. He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys; his is the rhythm of its seasonal processions, the involution and variation of its vegetal patterns... He is the flow of prevailing winds, the legend of ancient life... ~Mary Hunter Austin, "Hasta Mañana," The Land of Journeys' Ending, 1924
Man behaves as if he had created the world and could play with it. Pretty much at the beginning of his glorious development he coined the saying that man was the measure of all things. Then he quickly went to work and turned as much of the world as he could upside down... He has tailored and pruned away at beauty. ~Jean Arp (1887–1966), "The measure of all things," translated by Ralph Manheim, 1948
And man, the latest accident of Time,—
Who thinks he loves, and longs to understand,
Who vainly suffers, and in vain is brave,
Who dupes his heart with immortality,—
Man is a living lie, — a bitter jest
Upon himself, — a conscious grain of sand
Lost in a desert of unconsciousness,
Thirsting for God and mocked by his own thirst.
~Henry Van Dyke, "The Grand Canyon: Daybreak," 1913
We are, as I say, evolving like amphibians from one way of life to another, our heads emerge into progress but our hearts respond to tradition. We must come to terms with our own insufficiency. We find ourselves in a three-fold quandary between brain, egotism and heart. Our newly implemented reasoning powers, under the menace of extinction, urge us to organize and create; our ancient irrational instinct is not for creation and
The history of earth is a moving of leaves in the sun
closing behind the bodies of men, as the grasses
close after the hare and the junipers after the fox.
~Frances Frost, Woman of this Earth, 1934
The bootless ambition of modern humans seems to be to attain the point of getting everything and giving nothing, as nearly as may be. ~William Ellis, 1904
Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), translated by Norman Alliston, 1908 [i.e., coral polyps
The human species is made up of seven billion subspecies each consisting of one specimen. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Galen had told me that he gathered and kept anything that spoke to the nature of life on the islands. He did not discriminate between the mundane and the vital, the human and the animal, the tragic and the wonderful. He has told me that the greatest illusion of the human experience was the idea that we were outside of nature — that we were not a part of the food chain — that we were not animals ourselves. ~Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers, 2016
That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational and too serious to be temped by baubles. ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973
The word "progress" was poor consolation to the victims of it. Mrs. Anthon took no comfort in giving her own heart as one more red brick in the endless pavement men march on to unending ambition. ~Rupert Hughes, The Old Nest, 1911
Man 's the bad child of the Universe... ~James Oppenheim, "Laughter," War and Laughter, 1916
O dear old Universe, you big clumsy giant who find a whole sky too small to sprawl over,
You star-bellied monster,
Who outstare me with a Galaxy of eyes,
I, so little, your least tremor would crush me and my Earth,
I, your bad child,
Wink at you, and laugh...
~James Oppenheim, "Laughter," War and Laughter, 1916
I used to be a people person, but people ruined it. ~Author unknown
The human eye has a penetrating power of diacritical analysis, tearing things apart and labeling them with lightning rapidity. ~James H. Ecob, "Instantaneous Photographs," 1895
Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,—
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
~Robert Burns, "Man Was Made To Mourn: A Dirge," 1784
The greatest obscenity is man's inhumanity to man. ~Howard Moody
A song for man:
A song for the breaker of the wild Horse who clatters across the bridge of the Milky Way at midnight:
A song for the universe-wrestler, star-rider, the wing'd with dreams...
~James Oppenheim, "The Great Mother: Devil-Song," Golden Bird, 1923
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created people, and all people are created feeble, and all feeble are created minded, and all minded are created equal. ~E.E. Cummings, "And It Came to Pass," 1932 [Boosevelt
We, the compound of Sovereign, Soul and Sediment! ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Out of the deep and endless universe
There came a greater Mystery, a Shape,
A Something sad, inscrutable, august—
One to confront the worlds and question them.
~Edwin Markham, "Man"
Man is the criminal of conquest, and he is never content as long as the earth holds anything he does not possess. We either ought to know a great deal more or a great deal less. It is on the middle ground where the baby learns that the moon is very pretty, and before he knows that it is beyond the reach of a seven foot step-ladder that all the trouble begins. He was happy before he knew it was there, and he is happy after he finds he can't have it. But while he is finding out, it's a hard thing to quiet him. ~William Ellis, 1899
In his instincts man is as selfish as any animal that lives. ~Stanley J. Weyman, The House of the Wolf, 1888
The world will always be governed by self-interest. We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the interest of cads a little more coincident with that of the decent people. ~Samuel Butler (1835–1902),
"'What a piece of work is man!... And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' —Shakespeare." Ay, there's the rub! Capable of sublimest thought, world-shaking action, man is still dust. The weakest reed in nature, perhaps, but a thinking reed—one who communicates not only his thoughts but his feelings, hopes, fears, and dreams—all with humor, wit, and—sometimes—defiance, thumbing his nose at the world. ~Wesley Douglass Camp (1915–1991), Preface to What a Piece of Work Is Man: Camp's Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B.C. to the Present, 1989
The superlative is the excess of expression. We are a garrulous, demonstrative kind of creatures, and cannot live without much outlet for all our sense and nonsense. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Superlative," 1882
Hoard on hoard of pith and brain... ~William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), "Ballade of Truisms"
The tail of the monstrous Universe, with that tiny nub, the Earth, at the tip of it,
Restlessly slaps back and forth in ellipses about the sun…
And on the tail an immense process of parasitism
Has begotten at last that curio, Man,
Namely you and me…
~James Oppenheim, "Adventures in Darkness: Man, the Wonderful," War and Laughter, 1916
Humans have forgotten so much... It's so easy for us to live now that our lives have no meaning. So we start looking for something else, something more. Money. A bigger house. A hobby. Church. ~Abby Geni, The Wildlands, 2018
For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being. ~Christopher Morley, "To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence," 1921
Human life is the probating of God's will. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
The breath of fortune puffs us like a vane upon a steeple,
And every change is for the worse for earth's unhappy people;
They search Pandora's box for all that misery can find...
~Lizzie Marshall Berry (1847–1919), "Ill Winds," Heart Echoes: Original Miscellaneous and Devotional Poems, 1886
Man, that inveterate dreamer... ~André Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism," 1924, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
It is a strange fate that has made us an animal,
And yet at war with the animal in ourselves…
"Conquer your beast," has been a commandment in every creed…
It is our destiny then to overcome what we are,
And to be something we have never known in Nature…
The bees and the lions, the sun manœuvering in heaven — no, neither the chemic nor the quick,
Nothing we know makes this effort.
It is as if Man has to lift himself by his own bootstraps,
Up, a little above the Universe… and why?
~James Oppenheim, "Adventures in Darkness: Accepting the Worst," War and Laughter, 1916
Yet as no two leaves upon a tree are the same, so each life is a new equation of old and simple forces. ~Edward Howard Griggs, "Life," 1901
I have always wished that one of our great libraries might have on its walls a mural of the dramatic sequence of any man's progress from birth to death, the cycle of a human being... In its first panel is a garden in the early morning — that background of childhood where everyone of us learned the fascination of plant life, birds, and animals in the changing lights and colors of a day or of the seasons. The path broadens to a highway where friends and assailants too, jostle along in groups bent on undertakings or adventures. The luckiest have one or two sustainers who walk beside them in complete confidence and understanding for wide stretches of the climb. Occasionally, a comrade turns off on a side road and never returns. As the way mounts steeply through heat and storm and rough travel, the vistas widen and peaks of aspiration rise ahead. There are desert stretches. There are bonfires and hilarity. There are storms to battle and weird swamps to cross. There are woods of refreshment. In the end, each of us vanishes into a mist. ~Althea Warren (1886–1958), in Wilson Library Bulletin, 1943
Despise no man, since every one has his place in God's design. A sheet of brown paper may be better as a wrapper for a loaf of bread than a page from Homer... ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
There's a tension to being human... People are the only animals that die in childbirth... on a regular basis, I mean. It's really common for our species. Even now, with all our modern medicine... It's because of our brains... It makes you what you are, but it doesn't fit easily through a tiny birth canal. ~Abby Geni, The Wildlands, 2018
By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man — man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him. ~Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one — perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?" ~Joseph Wood Krutch
Satan becomes a supreme monarch of the mind when seated on the throne of human ambition. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat. ~Mark Twain
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy — they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jack-boot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all. Herein I probably differ from most people, who believe in Belief, and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than they do. ~E.M. Forster, "What I Believe," 1939
...I peruse
The present and the past, only to find
Mountains of human effort plied aloft
Like the Egyptian Pyramids, and toward
No end save folly…
~Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust, 1913
Man is the connecting link between dust and Deity. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
Third Fisherman: I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
First Fisherman: Why, as men do
~William Shakespeare, Pericles, c. 1608
I wonder if there is any more pathetic evidence of the fatuity and childishness of mankind than the "New Year's Resolution"? ~John Barrymore, journal, 1925
I like porcupines! But then, I like all animals — with the exception of certain brands of my own kind, that is. ~R. D. Lawrence, "The Quiet Browsers," A Shriek in the Forest Night: Wilderness Encounters, 1996
There are many fools among men; among animals none. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), "Man and his Maker," Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
The oldest, easiest-to-swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished. The betterment of mankind was, as we understood it, the whole point of the thing. Mastery over nature, mystery and all, was a moral duty and social obligation.
In the last few years we were wrenched away from this way of looking at it. and arrived at something like general agreement that we had it wrong. We still argue the details, but it is conceded almost everywhere that we are not the masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of life as are the leaves or midges or fish. We are part of the system. One way to put it is that the earth is a loosely formed, spherical organism, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis. We are, in this view, neither owners nor operators; at best, we might see ourselves as motile tissue specialized for receiving information — perhaps, in the best of all possible worlds, functioning as a nervous system for the whole being.
There is, for some, too much dependency in this view, and they prefer to see us as a separate, qualitatively different, special species, unlike any other form of life, despite the sharing around of genes, enzymes, and organelles. ~Lewis Thomas, "Natural Man," 1973
The geometry of human progress is an expanding circle of compassion. Every advance in thinking has shown that our relationships extend further than we thought. ~Carl Safina, 2010
Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself. ~Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long, 1973
If one could but arrive at a normal expression, how infinitely one could trust it. But life the beauteous is compelled into a distortion; life the human is made a beast.
One does not represent — he misrepresents.
One does not express — he is a malexpression.
~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: I," A Soul's Faring, 1921
One of the deepest unspoken prayers of our age is to be delivered from the bondage to fragments. We earnestly search for wholeness, for unity, for a sense of universality. Our intense individualism, in contrast with the sense of "one world" which gave even brutish existence in the Middle Ages a quality of security we lack, has left us with a profound sense of alienation and frustration. It is essential for us, at times, to recall and contemplate the unity of mankind throughout the ages, under one God.
In the words of John Donne, "All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God's hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."
~Rose Terlin (1908–1979), "The Better Part" (July 25th — "Wholeness"), in Meditations for Women, 1947, edited by Jean Beaven Abernethy
It is possible for a man to be very lonely in a crowd... ~G. Campbell Morgan, "Abram, Called of God," in Mid-Winter Bible Conference Echoes: A Book of Sermons and Addresses, 1914
All our human functions are immensely complicated by imagination and that form of extraneous memory called literature. ~Mary Hunter Austin, Love and the Soul Maker, 1914
The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget, — to get the means of sustenance (and
Humanity is a superhuman enterprise!... The purpose of which is to distinguish the race of man from the hodge-podge of the infinite, by means of the invincible forces of government and science. ~Jean Giraudoux, The Enchanted: A Comedy in Three Acts, 1933, adapted by Maurice Valency, English Acting Edition, 1950
I felt myself like a foolish bird, a bird born in a cage without power to attain freedom... I walked along the fields, by the neat iron railing with which they were enclosed. All about me was visible the care of man. Nature herself seemed under the power of the formal influence, and flourished with rigidity and decorum. Nothing was left wild. The trees were lopped into proper shape, cut down here where their presence seemed inelegant and planted there to complete the symmetry of a group. ~W. Somerset Maugham, 1900
God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages. ~Jacques Deval (1890–1972), Afin de vivre bel et bien, 1970
[T]ake time to see the humor in it all. The world is a funny place, and funniest of all are the creatures who walk about upright on two legs, believing that they run the place. ~Richard E. Turner (1937–2011), "An Open Letter to My Grandson," January 1997
You're human, you know, even if you do live in Mount Vernon and wear velvet collars on your evening coats! ~James Montgomery Flagg, "I Should Say So: Four Easy New Year's Resolutions," 1915
Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he's a cerebrate. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
The most delicate and the most essential piece of mechanism that a man has to deal with is the human machine. ~Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
All we hear is "What's the matter with the country?" "What's the matter with the world?" There ain't but one thing wrong with every one of us in the world, and that's selfishness. ~Will Rogers (1879–1935)
Better the thrush in the hollow,
Or the lark in the sky to be,
Than a man among men to wander
And their tragedies to see.
~John Gould Fletcher, "Freedom"
Turn me into a snake or a mole or a river-bed stone, or a wasp, or a gnat, or an icicle, but don't make me into a human! Boil me in dragon oil or grind me between thunder clouds, but don't let me suffer like man! Those insolent mortals who mock us and call faery folk the fancies of children and fools! ~George M. P. Baird, "The Theft of Thistledown: A Faery Interlude," 1915 [altered
The idea of human equality — a hopeful gloss of lipstick on the snout of truth. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all — the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them. ~J.K. Rowling, "The Man with Two Faces," Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 1997 [Albus Dumbledore
'Man' — Foxfield weighed the consideration — 'certainly has great powers of suppressing disagreeable facts and thoughts. He contrives not to think about unpleasant or unflattering things. But what happens at the back of his mind? Isn't there an uneasiness? Aren't most human beings now, au fond, uneasy?'
If man were relieved of all superstition, and all prejudice, and had replaced these with a keen sensitivity to his real environment, and moreover had achieved a level of communication so simplified that one syllable could express his every thought, then he would have achieved the level of intelligence already achieved by his dog. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
I have not read Nietzsche or Isben, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountain-head for information—that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race. I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born; I knew I should not find a single original thought in any philosophy, and I knew I could not furnish one to the world myself, if I had five centuries to invent it in. Nietzsche published his book, and was at once pronounced crazy by the world—by a world which included tens of thousands of bright, sane men who believed exactly as Nietzsche believed, but concealed the fact, and scoffed at Nietzsche. What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. ~Mark Twain
That brave gentleman,
That excellent adventurer,
That hardy devil— Man…
The two-legged dancing flicker on its rolling planet...
~James Oppenheim, "The Adventurer," War and Laughter, 1916
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Intellect lies dormant in a large share of the human race. They live to their bellies and leave their heads to their hatmaker. And thus it has come about that we can make hats in a factory to a fixed mold, and nearly everybody can find his fit... ~William Ellis, 1904
We build cities on quaking ground, or in the path of the tide or the cyclone; we cause floods by squandering forests; we bring on wars; we let in plagues; then we write editorials about the visitations of providence. ~Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought, 1914
Man likes to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But why does he also have such a passionate love for destruction and chaos? Now tell me that! ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Notes from Underground," 1864, translated by Ralph E. Matlaw, 1959
Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired. ~Mark Twain, 1903
Man is the most alive of living things. In him the traits which distinguish the animate from the inanimate become most pronounced. This is particularly true of his creativeness, which is essentially life giving. It introduces order into the randomness of nature... and is actuated not only by the present environment but by memories and goals. ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973
DON JUAN. By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty... Shall man give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it?...
THE DEVIL. You think because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them. ~Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, 1903
Storms of men are worse than storms of oceans. ~Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, 1869, translated from the French by Joseph L. Blamire
Perhaps the secret of the wilderness lies in that man has ever been a part of it. This is our birthright, the vast womb of eternity out of which all things and all men have come. Once, miraculously, there emerged a spark of consciously-motivated vitality from out of the darkness of a primeval swamp. It grew, this writhing, sluggish thing, and changed, and sought, never pursuing the middle course of safety, but reaching farther and farther, guided by Creation, rising from plane to plane until at last it walked upright and it was called man.
Then this ape-like creature with the often-changing body reached fullness of physical development and only one avenue of growth was left to it: the mind-road. And man turned to it and perfected his brain and his great powers of thought and he became the master of all things. And somewhere along this last, tortuous journey, he began to lose his early ties with Creation. They receded into lost places in the mind, these mysterious senses, and while the brain continued to develop conscious thought, they sank deeper and deeper into the abyss that opened when culture advanced and became almost a fine science. And so man paid his price for civilization...
Is there a message, a warning, in the bosom of nature telling man to have a care, else his great achievement, his fine powers of thought, will turn upon him and destroy him? ~R. D. Lawrence, The Place in the Forest, 1967
I struggle, sink, and swim in brimming lust
And grasp for beauty, why? because I must...
~D.C.L.D., "A Reverie," Castalian Splashes, 1916
Human pride is a strange thing; it cannot easily be suppressed, and if you stop up hole A will peep forth again in a twinkling from another hole B, and if this is closed it is ready to come out at hole C, and so on. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), translated by Norman Alliston, 1908
Life challenges each of us with an enigmatic and unyielding alchemy — making sense of the human experience. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
But we venture to say that human nature is human nature the world over, and will ever remain so... ~Human Nature: A Monthly Journal, Allen Haddock, ed., San Francisco, 1904
Not every great man is a grand human being. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), translated by Mrs Annis Lee Wister, 1882
It may be that all games are silly. But, then, so are human beings. This does not happen to be the planet into which the wiser spirits choose to be born. ~Robert Lynd, "Beaver," Solomon in All His Glory, 1923 [This essay first appeared in 1922 in the New Statesman with a slightly different wording.
Nature is now.
Humans are a tangled mess of past, present, and future.
~Terri Guillemets
What is man but a painful wart on the heel of time. ~John Collins, "Man," in The Medical Brief, October 1896
What is man but a species of vermin crawling upon the bare skin of Mother Nature? ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Nature, or that sacred and supreme Cause of all Things, which we term God, has furnished his Creatures with such Guides as may best conduct them to the several Ends of their Beings. To the Birds, Beasts, and other Animals, which we generally hold inferiour to Mankind, he gave Instinct, as sufficient to direct them to all that is necessary for them.... But in Man.... the Things from which the Mind must gather, and of which compose all these, are so vast in Number, and so various and obscure in their Natures, that without the help of a very good Guide, it may make a Collection of Poisons instead of Medicines, and reap its Destruction, not Satisfaction; but the omnipotent Cause, that had so well furnished Brutes, left not the Mind of Man without its Director in this Maze and Lottery of Things; he gave it Reason, and its sovereign Rule and Touch-stone to examine them by, and to fit our Choice to our double Advantage of Body and Mind. Reason is the Light, that brings Day to those Things, that will contribute to, or oppose our Happiness; without which we should in vain grope in the dark; and we should owe entirely to Chance what we obtained. It is true, Reason is not sufficient to bring us to a perfect Knowledge of all Things, but it is able to furnish us with enough to make us happy, and that is as much as we need care for. ~Thomas Burnet, "An Essay on the Use of Reason in Religion," Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, 1692, translated from the Latin by Mr. Foxton, 1729
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled... ~Henry David Thoreau
It was a lovely night, one of those nights, dear reader, which can only happen when you are young. The sky was so bright and starry that when you looked at it the first question that came into your mind was whether it was really possible that all sorts of bad-tempered and unstable people could live under such a glorious sky. ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "White Nights," 1848, translated by David Magarshack, 1950
"So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses, didn't it?" said Atticus. "That proves something — that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children..." ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960
...the ancient instinct of collecting... ~Thomas Rohan, Old Beautiful, 1926
REPORT ON THE PLANET, EARTH
These are my findings:
The inhabitants thereof are not very game:
They complain and whine a great deal:
They cannot stand pain:
They object to work:
They think of nothing but themselves:
No concern for these crowded heavens around them:
Nor Earth's purpose in the skies:
Quarrelsome, they slaughter each other with ingenious death-dealers:
They bind themselves with strange chains to one another:
They fear the new: they fear the old: they fear birth: they shrink from death:
Those that have visions among them are persecuted:
They applaud any one who makes them forget what they are and whither they are going:
They are cruel, stupid, childish, undeveloped...
Primitive, perilous...
They have builded larger than themselves:
Giant cities have sprung from their pigmy hands...
I have to report:
That though the Earth is rich, yet most of them are very poor:
In bitter want:
Curious, this childish snatching of things from each other!
Greed is their stupidest sin!...
Hypocrisy rampant, and hardly any one passing for what he really is:
But advertising himself as something quite other:
Yes, anything to succeed!...
And every one sentimental: glossing it all over with a call to love for mother, for children, for one's country...
And... this is what puzzles me:
An Earth so absorbingly interesting, so electric in spite of its dullness, so joyous in spite of its pain,
That, were I not compelled to make my cosmic examinations,
I should love to live there, say, three-score ten years of their life!
~James Oppenheim, "Report on the Planet, Earth," War and Laughter, 1916
In what light we are view'd by superior Beings, may be gather'd from a Piece of late West India News, which possibly has not yet reach'd you. A young Angel of Distinction being sent down to this World on some Business for the first time, had an old Courier-Spirit assign'd him as a Guide. They arriv'd over the Seas of Martinico in the middle of the long Day of obstinate Fights between the Fleets of Rodney & DeGrasse. When thro' the Clouds of Smoke he saw the Fire of the Guns, the Decks cover'd with mangled Limbs, & Bodies dead or dying, the Ships sinking, burning, or blown into the Air, and the Quantity of Pain, Misery, and Destruction the Crews yet alive were thus with so much Eagerness dealing round to one another; he turn'd angrily to his Guide, & said, You blundering Blockhead, you are ignorant of your Business; you undertook to conduct me to the Earth, and you have brought me into Hell!— No, Sir, says the Guide; I have made no Mistake; this is really the Earth, and these are Men. Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner; they have more Sense, and more of what Men (vainly) call Humanity! ~Benjamin Franklin, letter to Joseph Priestley, 1782
Every human being is a centre of the universe. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline, and proportion, except when shattered by geological convulsions; and in these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets herself at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, as nearly as practicable, the former aspect of her dominion... The fact is that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power... Man pursues his victims with reckless destructiveness; and, while the sacrifice of life by the lower animals is limited by the cravings of appetite, he unsparingly persecutes, even to extirpation, thousands of organic forms which he cannot consume. ~George P. Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, 1864
In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease — a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them. ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
On the Sixth Day, God created man, the sort of result you often get when you go in to work on a Saturday. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill... "Yes sir, a clown," he said. "There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off."
"You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them."
"Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks." ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960
We are living relics of our birth,
Keepsakes of Mother Earth.
~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
A gorger on food, and the beer-joys, and flesh… ~James Oppenheim, "Self," The Book of Self, 1917
Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognize ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Man is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court.
If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our attention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of ideas. ~George Santayana, "The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men," Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana, with the collaboration of the author, by Logan Pearsall Smith, 1921
God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
My craving for companionship is so great that I spent half an hour yesterday discussing various matters of biological philosophy with a small shaggy-haired pony who stuck his head over a gate. He was taciturn but, I felt, thoroughly sound. He seemed to be as much in the mood for company as I was.
Queer beast you are, I thought; my cousin many million times removed. Yet bone for bone except for a canine tooth or so, this long hammer-head of yours corresponds with mine. Your cranium has a brain, so like mine that if it were dissected out and put in a bottle of spirits with its nerves cut off many non-medical people would guess it was human. Your cranial nerves, your facial and pneumogastric and all the rest of them, spread to the very pattern of mine except for slight differences of scale and proportion because of this long jowl of yours. They behave, I am sure, in the same way. You flick your ears with a vigour I envy, and your bold outstanding eye has an inspeculative glow far beyond any of my recessed expressions. And you wear your hair all down your neck instead of on top like mine... Hairy you are, but you are free to call me bald-faced; and your cheek and neck were made for stroking. You are capable of all this frank mute friendliness, and had I an apple in my pocket for you our confidence and understanding would be complete. How far can you go in the way of my perplexities? 'Such is life,' you seem to say. 'Not bad in the air and sunshine.'
...I doubt if you think about yourself at all. You just see, hear, smell, and feel directly and then you react. You never think
All we mammals have been accumulating brains quite beyond our immediate needs, we have accumulated them indeed through our individual need to survive, but now suddenly with speech and writing and computation and record and communications, these brains break out from their original immediate preoccupations, get into touch, stimulate one another, react upon and enhance one another so that now we human beings are all floated off our private feet and out of our private holes and corners, into a sort of common mind, which produces inventions, novel ideas of conduct, collective guiding ideas. Our brains have run away with us and seem to be pooling themselves over us. We cease to be exclusively ourselves. You are a pony and there your brain begins and ends, but I am Stephen Wilbeck mixed up with all those other people past and present who have given way to ideas. Perhaps you would like me to tell you more about that. There have been stages, you must understand, in this usurpation of the brain, since it woke up from the limited inaggressive usefulness of your intelligence. One could write a sort of history of the rise of the Brain Empire in the Animal World. First the brain discovered individuality and concentrated itself about itself to produce the furious egotism of the Dolores stage of human progress... and then secondly came the realization of a possible collective mind... and the brain began to launch these attacks against egotism which we call religion, science and philosophy. First the evolution of the conscious brain gathered Homo up into an individual egotism like a clenched fist, and then it (nature or the Life Force or what you will) seemed to realize it had gone too far and turned upon itself. And so we have our moral conflict.
Man is the only trained animal who expects his reward before he does his trick. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. ~Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by M.A. Mügge, 1908
Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
As a rule, human beings see that which they want to look at, such perceptions being consciously noted. But for the most part, humans do not use their eyes as do wolves and other wild animals, who must look at everything in their world and take conscious note of it, no matter how small or insignificant an object may be. People don't need to be so constantly alert. Compared with other mammals, we live in relatively unchanging environments in which such things as our safety, our home, our food supply, and our mode of travel are usually assured... Because of these things, most humans do not make proper use of their visual capabilities. ~R. D. Lawrence, In Praise of Wolves, 1986
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, 1849
Vain man sits in judgment on Nature's wisdom, and thinks to determine its merits or assumes to point out its demerits—as much as if he were omniscient. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
No matter what the how of life may be,—
If wheeling tides of planets, comet-cast,
Were flung into a fiery, white-lit sea,
And set to silent music through the vast
Abyss of night, until the earth at last
Was formed and man evolved unto his age,
With wealth of kinship to all life amassed,
Akin to birds and to the flowering sage,—
We still are mystic folk of wonder heritage.
No matter how our ancient sires were made;
God knows, and we may never understand.
It is enough that breath of life was laid
Upon our lips, and strength is in our hand.
God knows the how of every grain of sand,
But can we tell ourselves what is the real?
It is enough we live at His command
And, living, grow in love, and, loving, feel
Ourselves evolving true unto the God-ideal.
~Leland Moore, "Evolution," 1926
We are each of us born into the arms of mortality, the Lord recognizing our need to be held. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
It is the fancy of every mortal that being cradled in the arms of mortality is a safe place for the time being. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
IDLE Useless.
IDOLIZE To make useless.
~Charles Wayland Towne, The Foolish Dictionary, Executed by Gideon Wurdz, Master of Pholly, Doctor of Loquacious Lunacy, etc., 1904
Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
We may be the intelligent species, but we are certainly not the smartest! ~Kyle Short
Every time you think we’ve touched bottom in the abyss of human stupidity, another deep crevasse seems – as if by magic — to appear. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being. ~Terri Irwin, Steve & Me, 2007
Humanity is a plague. We're a disgusting, narcissistic, selfish parasite. And the world would be a better place without us. ~After Life, written by Ricky Gervais, 2019
Mine eyes grow dizzy 'mid the cities' glooms.
What but complete destruction here shall save
The toiling millions?...
Hope flares and fades as do the death-white plumes
Of steam that from the hissing engines wave;
And in the hearts that should be happy, rave
The incessant voices of the terrible looms...
And what shall mend?...
Can any Spring call forth in wondrous flower
This buried life to all that life might be?
Or waits the world but for one whelming hour
When all shall perish in Time's soundless sea?
The world is chaos; and the Masses stream
Like beasts upon whose vision phantoms swarm.
Yet life from matter slowly moulds a form,
And far to-morrow holds some fairer gleam
For who can see...
Endure! Endure! It is no endless range
Of years that lead us where at last man's power
Shall mould his own salvation, in victorious change.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest, 1910
How hard it is to be compelled to regret our good deeds! ~Publilius Syrus, 1st century BCE, from the Latin by D. Lyman, 1856
The doctors tell us of a physical disease called fatty degeneration of the heart... there is a moral malady—fatty degeneration of the soul; sooner or later it attacks every man, however noble his career, who puts self forward in his aims; who values fame because a personal possession. ~Frank Lee Benedict, The Price She Paid, 1882
The way creatures contact one another can change. Let me try and explain what I am getting at in that. How does a dog contact its fellows? Touch, not very accurate achromatic sight, rich abundant smell, sex as a transient storm; what else is there that reaches from dog to dog? Our contacts are fuller than that. And they are becoming subtler and more abundant. Ages ago man began to elaborate life by using definite words. Also he began to clothe and elaborate love. He became more companionable. By words especially. Lovers talk and weave a thousand fancies. Words become the mechanism of a vast abundance of suggestion and enrichment. We smell each other's minds in conversation. And man's eyes also become more exact. We see with a new precision and discover beauty. We harmonize. We recede a little from the elementary contacts in order to achieve other and wider and lovelier ones. We are reluctant to recede from those elementary contacts, because of the extravagant expectations with which they allure us, but we must. We love the mind that speaks to us in music, we find beauty in pictures, we respond to the wisdom or to the caress in a poem. We love the woman Leonardo loved and writers who were bodily dead centuries ago live on to stir us. Our contacts stretch out more and more beyond the here and the now.
...remember always that Panic controls the soul of a Crowd. ~Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938), Le Vergini delle Rocce, 1896, translated from the Italian by Annetta Halliday-Antona and Giuseppe Valerio-Antona, The Maidens of the Rocks, 1898 ["...ma ricordatevi sempre che l'anima della Folla è in balia del Pánico."
When enough people share the same insanity, it is considered normal. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
Man is weak and when he makes strength his profession he is weaker. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
Every extraordinary occurrence unsettles the heads of hundreds of thousands of men for a few moments or hours or days. ~Mark Twain, 1901
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied. ~Mark Twain
Ah! we far-seekers!...
...the far-world seeking of each heart.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter, 1914
We humans are the greatest of the earth's parasites. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Often what we take for a kindness is just someone acting in their capacity as a human being. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
Man's greed for power and for money
Has strangled, within his own soul,
The richness and beauty of Truth
That would help him to reach his goal!
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "God's Gifts to Man," 1940s
As a consequence of mankind's gross habits, lamentable sicknesses and mysterious contagions have come, and every few years new ones appear as a result of our neglect to understand Nature's commands... It is indeed a warning... ~Alwyn M. Thurber, The Hidden Faith: An Occult Story of the Period, 1895
...that wretched green ball,
Earth, saddest of infinite spheres,
Where Mammon and Ignorance league
With Hunger and Death...
~George M. P. Baird, "The Theft of Thistledown: A Faery Interlude," 1915
Self and soil! — ha! ha! "The soil is always grateful," says my uncle — "makes you a return in exact proportion to what you bestow on it in the way of manure and labor, — men don't." Says he, "the man that has got one hand in your pocket shakes the other fist in your face; the man that has got both hands in your pocket spits in your face." ~Charles Reade, White Lies
When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man's remains will be in rigor mortis. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
You have to believe there's a little good in everyone, although if there isn't, that would explain everything. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
To be continually busy about a mildly varied series of small things is still the common desire of mankind.
Consider us, Creation!
Though you took patient eras beyond counting to create us,
Somehow we are enough detached from you, and from your purpose,
To look back, and laugh...
Consider how your bad children get around you…
We put our fingers to our noses and wiggle them at you...
We tear our Earth up...
You think to darken us with the night, so we light lamps...
Are we not cynical, uproarious, obscene and impudent?
Do we not proclaim ourselves the top-notch of the world?...
Already the wizened stars must be worried, dumb-founded,
To catch that raucous cackle and chortle from the worthless Earth...
That noise of relatives eating ham sandwiches after the funeral is over...
~James Oppenheim, "Laughter," War and Laughter, 1916
Every man is a millionaire in some part of his nature, and a pauper in others. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
One man's wickedness may easily become all men's curse. ~Publilius Syrus, 1st century BCE, from the Latin by D. Lyman, 1856
A few men's depravity is all men's calamity. ~Publilius Syrus, 1st century BCE, from the Latin by D. Lyman, 1856
I am, I realize, muddy-minded. My mind is not comprehensive enough and it is too congested by minor issues and impulsions, to take a clear view of existence. It is encumbered like a crystal trying to form in a magma loaded with irrelevant matter. But nevertheless it has a considerable apprehension of potentialities. The shape of the crystal, the form of this world is perceptible to me. It is the common lot to be muddy-minded; I am muddy-minded, you are muddy-minded, he is muddy-minded; past, present and future indicative you can conjugate it; nevertheless I believe, that by getting numbers of people to think as hard as they can and state as clearly as they can, and then by bringing their results together, gradually, steadily, a
I believe that a just general idea of a new life for mankind is existent — latent — amidst the confusions of our time, and that as it emerges to lucidity, it will have compelling power in the measure of its lucidity... As the Right Thing to Do becomes patent, we shall fall into our rôles.
First God created time; then God created man that man might, in the course of time, perfect himself; then God decided that He'd better create eternity. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Wretched, miserable, and grimed with sin am I
(If sin there be, a clash of law with law in clanging harmony)
With a will adamant, and yet a man am I
Though ye be gods, I'm proud of being man
A rude descendant of a gaping Eve...
~D.C.L.D., "A Reverie," Castalian Splashes, 1916
Those who reject biological evolution do so, usually, not out of reason, but out of unjustified vanity. ~Isaac Asimov
We are monkeys with money and guns. ~Tom Waits, tomwaits.com
Man waz kreated a little lower than the angells — and haz bin gitting a little lower ever sinse. ~Josh Billings, "Darwin Theory and Whiskee Theory"
Men are created like upright angels, but too often behave like downright devils. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
Perchance God will pity a race that sought the better angels of its nature and found only its lesser demons. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. ~Charles Darwin (1809–1882), final paragraph of The Descent of Man, 1871
Grant fretted and irritated him.... He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages.... That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous.... The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin. ~Henry Adams (1838–1918), The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XVII [Adams wrote this third-person autobiography in 1905. It was first publicly published in 1918 from the 1907 private printing.
Evolution: that last step was a doozy! ~Terri Guillemets
Evolution has stepped from the balloon into the parachute. ~Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought, 1914
We are told that we have ascended from the ape; but some of us are using round-trip tickets. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1904, George Horace Lorimer, editor
Those who are horrified at Mr. Darwin's theory, may comfort themselves with the assurance that, if we are descended from the ape, we have not descended so far as to preclude all hope of return. ~Ambrose Bierce
Evolution is individual — devolution is collective. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Evolution: one small step for man, one giant leap backward for mankind. ~Terri Guillemets
We are now one hundred years in the future, —
Man, after all, may be but one of God's discarded experiments. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
With an anvil-ding
And with fire in him forge thy will
Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still...
~Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," 1876
Herds may do much ill-considered and foolish trampling; the choice between being a trampling fool — or a wise man trampled — is not difficult to make. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
The human organism has now become too refined to permit habits so gross to go on. ~Alwyn M. Thurber, The Hidden Faith: An Occult Story of the Period, 1895
Human nature is just about the only nature some people experience. ~Terri Guillemets
Man has our bondage made;
Man has weighed down our doom...
~Arthur Davison Ficke, The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest, 1910
In the remote past we began to live. The first birthday was far back, at some crossroad of time. The wonder-working matter of the ages, the teachings of savants, the clash and death grapple of armies, the upheavals of nature, the admixtures of races, the inventions of men and dispensations of God have shaped our course. Is it not the better plan to follow it calmly, making the most of what we are, and without futile rebellion? ~Ellsworth R. Bathrick (1863–1917), "Don't Worry Book," 1909, as quoted by Mill Supplies, 1915
It is truly said that the most important survival tool is the mind... Granted, we do not have the legs of the deer, the fur of the rabbit, or the claws of the cat. But we have the will and intelligence to adapt to almost any natural environment on earth. Most of us are much stronger and more capable than we realize. One of the first steps in a survival situation, then, is to realize and acknowledge that strength... a quality of spirit and character that is often hidden in modern society. ~Tom Brown, Jr. and Brandt Morgan, Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival, 1983
A strong, brave man is born each month,
each year God gives a sage to men,
A poet each ten years, perhaps,
but an unselfish person,—when?
~Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899
We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
Is man only a bloody flesh
With the stitching needles of passion and thinking flashing in and out,
A mouth, a phallus, a hand,
Ambition, despair — no more?
~James Oppenheim, "Abyss," Golden Bird, 1923
Infinitely will I trust nature's instincts and promptings, but I will not call my own perversions nature. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers," in The Open Court, August 1903
At one time a bitter argument raged as to whether heredity or environment was more important in determining human traits. Further research has made it abundantly clear that both physical and mental characters are the result of the interplay of genetic and environmental factors. ~Claude Alvin Villee, Jr., Biology, 1954
Lucifer (to Gabriel):
My sorrow crowns me. Get thee back to heaven,
And leave me to the earth, which is mine own
In virtue of her ruin, as I hers
In virtue of my revolt!...
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "A Drama of Exile"
Lucifer:
My foot is on the earth, firm as my sin....
My sin is on the earth, to reign thereon....
My woe is on the earth, to curse thereby....
And peradventure in the after years,
When thoughtful men shall bend their spacious brows
Upon the storm and strife seen everywhere
To ruffle their smooth manhood and break up
With lurid lights of intermittent hope
Their human fear and wrong, — they may discern
The heart of a lost angel in the earth.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "A Drama of Exile"
And when I plan and publish books — or write this stuff I am writing now — I do that also for an unseen intimate. Someone whom I hope I shall never meet to quarrel with, or disappoint, or experience his or her everyday inadequacy, will read this. Maybe human intimacy is escaping from the prison of the present and the visible, the prison of our current life, unlocking the door but still using the old cell for sleeping and eating. We'll still love sights and sounds and desire pretty people, but lightly and transitorily, not cruelly and insatiably, and our invisible tentacles will stretch through time and space to an altogether deeper and different fellowship. A man who sits in a quiet room reading or writing, listening or thinking, may seem to be solitary and isolated. But in fact he is in contact with myriads of intimates. He has a thousand intimacies, each closer and a thousand times finer than those of a peasant with his wife or with his dearest boon companions.…
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
Ignorance of the facts of life is to blame for the majority of human tragedies. ~Bernard Bernard, 1926
the human journey:
to change so much
you end up right
where you began
~Terri Guillemets
Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Has man fallen?
You, man, arise…
~James Oppenheim, "1914—And After," War and Laughter, 1916
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