Man is an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. Ambrose Bierce
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly. Anatole France
The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counterbalances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living. Somerset Maugham
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen. Aristotle
What does reason demand of a man? A very easy thing, to live in accord with his own nature. Seneca
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples. Charles Dickens
What characterizes man is the richness and subtlety, the variety and versatility of his nature. Ernst Cassirer
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it. James Agate
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius. Josh Billings
To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens. Frantz Fanon
A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless. W. H. Auden
The public prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many. Andre Gide
We don’t cut our nails to disarm ourselves. On the contrary; just to make us look more civilized, so we can hold our own in a far more desperate struggle than the one our ancestors fought with nothing but their claws. Luigi Pirandello
I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment. Alan Bennett
How good is man’s life, the mere living, how fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy. Robert Browning
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as nature is. Nietzsche
Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers. Lord Chesterfield
Society is always trying in some way or another to grind us down to a single flat surface. Oliver Wendell Holmes
The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans. Edmond and Jules De Concourt
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. Adlai Stevenson
Who can endure the crassness of the common herd? Are folk not presumptuous, warped and absurd; putting barriers between self and the thing they should see, self-measuring by self the whole community. LA Fontaine
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of god. Humanity is just a work in progress. Tennessee Williams
None of us can estimate what we do, when we do it from instinct. Luigi Pirandello
Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state. Emerson
Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life. Edward Dahlberg
I guess there is about as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more. Edward Noyes Westcott
Before man made us citizens; great nature made us men. James Russell Lowell
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death; multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. D. H. Lawrence
We hold the view that the people make the best judgment in the long run. John F. Kennedy
Alas for this mad melancholy beast man. What fantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action. Nietzsche
Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer. John Keats
Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole. Frank Moore Colby
Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them. Nathaniel Hawthorne
In the crowd herd or gang, it is a mass-mind that operates; which is to say, a mind without subtlety, a mind without compassion, a mind finally uncivilized. Robert Lindner
The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth, and the music of the air. Tagore
The citizen is a variety of man; whether a degenerate or a primitive variety. Remy De Gourmont
We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can’t make it think. Luigi Pirandello
Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. Herman Melville
Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society. Hendrik Willem Van Loon
We have been god-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves. Arnold Toynbee
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. Lord Chesterfield
Mankind has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with mankind is man. James Thurber
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. Oscar Wilde
The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns. Thomas Hardy
I am the people, the mob, the mass, the crowd. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? Carl Sandburg
Know, man has all that nature has, but more; and in that more lie all his hopes of good. Matthew Arnold
Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane. Joseph Wood Krutch
By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to wide apart. Confucius
Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works intelligence. Henri Frederic Amiel
It is obvious that the best qualities in man must atrophy in a standing-room-only environment. Stewart L. Udall
.jpg "Life") |
| That's Life |
A chance to rediscover the profound wisdom of those who have made the difficult journey through this life before us; those who, like our Lord Jesus Christ, taught us that this life is but one passing phase of our existence and that reality lies within each one of us. Prince Charles
A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. George Eliot
Men are living now just the way they were before, as if we didn't have a new all over-shadowing danger to deal with and it’s clear, they have learned nothing from the horrors they've experienced. The little intrigues, with which they complicated their lives before, take up again the greatest part of their thoughts. What a strange species we are. Albert Einstein
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. Aldous Huxley
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Darwin
The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought. Alfred North Whitehead
I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition; about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive. Maya Angelou
What is the meaning of life? That was all; a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Virginia Woolf
A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one. Marjorie Rawlings
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the proton and electron. The remarkable thing is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. Stephen Hawking
It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others. Leonardo Da Vinci
Make the best of your circumstances: no one has everything and everyone has something of sorrow intermingled with the gladness of life. The trick is to make the laughter outweigh the tears. Robert Louis Stevenson
Life is the only real counsellor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. Edith Wharton
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived; that is to have succeeded. Emerson
There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants. Montaigne
The city is the image of the soul, the surrounding walls being the frontier between the outward and inward life. The gates are the faculties or senses connecting the life of the soul with the outward world. Living springs of water rise within it. And in the center, where beats the heart, stands the holy sanctuary. St. Catherine of Sienna
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. Mark Twain
Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die? Charles Lindbergh
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it. Emerson
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. George Eliot
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. Dwight Eisenhower
So many people seem unhappy because they’re not doing something important. But what does it matter what a man does, provided he gives, contributes? You must make yourself love what you do, and do it as best you can. What other reason for life can we ever really know for sure? Ed Louette
I treasure this strange combination found in very few persons: a fierce desire for life as well as a lucid perception of the ultimate futility of the quest. Madeleine Gobeil
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life. Rachel Carson
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. Lowell
It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man’s character from the fountain upwards. Robert Louis Stevenson
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time. Franklin Adams
We must use time wisely, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Nelson Mandela
Live for the moment, you cannot find peace when avoiding life.
Virginia Wood
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be. Wayne W Dyer
