Creeping Man Quotes

The Croft
East Dene, Sussex


August 11th, 1922


My dear Watson,

I have taken our discussion of this afternoon to heart, considered it carefully, and am prepared to modify my previous opinions.
I am amenable to your publishing your account of the incidents of 1903, specifically of the final case before my retirement, under the following conditions.
In addition to the usual changes that you would make to disguise actual people and places, I would suggest that you replace the entire scenario we encountered (I speak of Professor Presbury's garden. I shall not write of it further here) with monkey glands, or a similar extract from the testes of an ape or lemur, sent by some foreign mystery-man. Perhaps the monkey-extract could have the effect of making Professor Presbury move like an ape - he could be some kind of "creeping man," perhaps? - or possibly make him able to clamber up the sides of buildings and up trees. I would suggest that he grow a tail, but this might be too fanciful even for you, Watson, although no more fanciful than many of the rococo additions you have made in your histories to otherwise humdrum events in my life and work.
In addition, I have written the following speech, to be delivered by myself, at the end of your narrative. Please make certain that something much like this is there, in which I inveigh against living too long, and the foolish urges that push foolish people to do foolish things t ~ Neil Gaiman

When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

You're a man, darling. There's something sick and twisted inside you, making you relish girly torture. I don't understand it myself. Never did. ~ Linda Kage

This is roughly the worldview for Neon Genesis Evangelion. This is a worldview drenched in a vision of pessimism. A worldview where the story starts only after any traces of optimism have been removed.
[...]
They say, "To live is to change." I started this production with the wish that once the production complete, the world, and the heroes would change. That was my "true" desire. I tried to include everything of myself in Neon Genesis Evangelion-myself, a broken man who could do nothing for four years. A man who ran away for four years, one who was simply not dead. Then one thought. "You can't run away," came to me, and I restarted this production. It is a production where my only thought was to burn my feelings into film. I know my behavior was thoughtless, troublesome, and arrogant. But I tried. I don't know what the result will be. That is because within me, the story is not yet finished. I don't know what will happen to Shinji, Misato or Rei. I don't know where life will take them. Because I don't know where life is taking the staff of the production. I feel that I am being irresponsible. But... But it's only natural that we should synchronize ourselves with the world within the production. I've taken on a risk: "It's just an imitation." And for now I can only write this explanation. But perhaps our "original" lies somewhere within there. ~ Hideaki Anno

Truth and, by consequence, liberty, will always be the chief power of honest men. ~ Madame De Stael

Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had. ~ Milan Kundera

For man is by nature an artist. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist. ~ Bela Bartok

Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world. ~ Morarji Desai

I bet he also didn't mention that I stick pins into the eyes of everybody who annoys me. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the man who was wise enough to only annoy me once. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

I ate shit, did shit I hated, scored marks on my goddamned soul to fight for the life I wanted. Being that man, do you think I'm gonna let the first woman in my life who makes me happy slip through my fingers? ~ Kristen Ashley

The beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over. ~ Annette Dumbach

Why yes, I can,' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon. ~ Ayn Rand

In spiritual issues
(by "spiritual" I mean: "pertaining to man's consciousness")
a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues. ~ Ayn Rand

He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze. ~ Joseph O'Connor

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

A rescuer appeared out of the forest.
"You screamed, madam?"
"Why, Lord Mersey, what are you doing here?"
"Following you, of course. Spot of bother?"
"Little bit of one, yes."
The young man looked with interest at Sophronia's opponents, one holding a collapsed Dimity, one bleeding from a gash to the arm, and the third bleeding from a wound to the back.
"My dear Ria, you hardly need my help."
"Hardly. ~ Gail Carriger

There is no environment where man can flee to escape the revelational presence of God (Ps. 139:8). ~ Greg L. Bahnsen

To be pessimist is to amputate one's own legs and arms! Only an optimist man has the ability to move! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

To be Christians finally, it is our duty and obligation to foster only those convictions that are justified by reason and experience, that have passed through the crucible of analysis, in a word, to act sensibly and not senselessly as in dreams or delirium, so as not to bring harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. Then, then it will be a real Christian deed, not only a mystical one, but a sensible and truly philanthropic deed ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Of course, we in the West like to pat ourselves on the back and say we're more tolerant, and we are
but tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance. It just means, We think you're crazy and going to hell, but we won't kill you for it
we'll tolerate you. But you don't know who the Man in the Sky is, and we do. ~ Bill Maher

I got dragged to Hell by demons from the dawn of time. While I was down there, I killed monsters and became a hit man for the devil's friends. How have you been?" The guy's smile curdles. He takes a step back. "Don't let me catch you hanging around the halls anymore, okay? I'll have to call the manager." "No problem, Brenda. You have an extra cigarette?" "My name's Phil." "You have an extra cigarette, Chet?" He walks away and gets a good twenty feet before he mumbles "Fuck you," sure I can't hear him. ~ Richard Kadrey

What impropriety or limit can there be in our grief for a man so beloved?. ~ Horace

I do support a constitutional amendment on marriage between a man and a woman, but I would not be going into the states to overturn their state law. ~ Michele Bachmann

And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man. ~ Solomon Burke

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'
Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'
That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap. ~ David Eddings

Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb's Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons. ~ Stephen King

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I believe marriage should be between one man and one woman. That's my view, and that'll be the view of our state because I wouldn't sign a bill that - like the one that was in New York. ~ Chris Christie

Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape. ~ Ridley Scott

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I don't think I'm going to let you wear knickers again this week." The man was lethal. This was all a big game to him, and he was a world-class player. ~ Kitty French

A THOUSAND WORDS

My stepfather Ralph Newman was a merry and remarkable man, a former minor league second baseman who broke his nose on a double play ball and wound up opening the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago. He was also president of the Chicago Public Library.

Ralph used to huff about that phrase, A picture is worth a thousand words and ask, "Does anyone really stop to figure out what you could do with a thousand words?"

And, rather in the way that my daughters and I trade, try out, and create stories with each other, my stepfather and I spread out a napkin and came up with this:

One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you:
the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm,
the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary.

You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth. ~ Scott Simon

You could not receive a young man in your room; you might be permitted to have him to tea in one of the public reception rooms, but you could accept no invitation from young men to tea or other entertainment without a chaperone from the College. ~ Dora Russell

A man embrace fire and his clothes not be burned? ~ Anonymous

I do not know you, my friends, not individually, most of you, but this is the wonderful thing about the work of a preacher, he does not need to know his congregation. Do you know why? Because I know the most important thing about every single one of you, and that is that each of you is a vile sinner. I do not care who you are, because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I do not care what particular form your sin takes. There is a great deal of attention paid to that today. The preacher is not interested in that. I do not want a catalogue of your sins. I do not care what your sins are. They can be very respectable or they can be heinous, vile, foul, filthy. It does not matter, thank God. But what I have authority to tell you is this. Though you may be the vilest man or woman ever known, and though you may until this moment have lived your life in the gutters and the brothels of sin in every shape and form, I say this to you: be it known unto you that through this man, this Lord Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. And by him all who believe, you included, are at this very moment justified entirely and completely from everything you have ever done - if you believe that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that he died there on the cross, for your sins and to bear your punishment. If you believe that, and thank him for it, and rely utterly only upon him and what he has done, I tell you, in the name of God, all your sins are b ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, concludes his book The Conquest of Happiness by describing a happy person thus: "Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found. ~ Eric Weiner

I like watches from that era. Back then a watch was power. Not many people could afford one. The owner of a watch was a man who controlled time ... chains and fobs were invented so that even when a man carried a watch in his pocket, you could still see he owned one ~ Jeffery Deaver

Do not seek earthly glory in any matter, for it is extinguished for him who loves it. In its time it blows on a man like a strong wind, and then quickly, taking from him the fruits of his good works, it goes away from him, laughing at his foolishness. ~ Gennadius Of Constantinople

Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, or who already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man. ~ David McCullough

If the village worker is not a decent man or woman, conducting a decent home, he or she had better not aspire after the high privilege and honour of becoming a village worker. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The corne hides it self in the snow, as an old man in furrs. ~ George Herbert

There are two types of laws, those that are just and those that are unjust. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law ... Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.