Potential Of Man Quotes

The difference between man and God is significant - but it is one of degree, not kind. It is the difference between an acorn and an oak tree, a rosebud and a rose, a son and a father ... Every man is a potential god in embryo. ~ Tad R. Callister

We serve God by serving our fellow man; kids are suffering from malnutrition. People are going to the fields hungry. If you are a Christian, we are tired of being mistreated. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer

If there be a people on earth whose more especial duty it is to be at all times prepared to defend the rights with which they are blessed, and to surpass all others in sustaining the necessary burthens, and in submitting to sacrifices to make such preparations, it is undoubtedly the people of these states. ~ James Monroe

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. ~ William James

A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The law of tithing is one of the most important
ever revealed to man ... Through obeying
this law the blessings of prosperity and
success will be given to the Saints. ~ Lorenzo Snow

Did Jane Austen ruin lives by giving people false expectations about love? Were her heroes just too good to be true? Could a real man of flesh and blood ever hope to live up to such paragons? And were books with happy endings cruel? Did they give their readers a warped view of the world and what they could expect from it? ~ Victoria Connelly

A bald man made an attempt on Constant's life with a hot dog. Stabbed at the window glass with it. Splayed the bun. Broke the frankfurter. Left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

At such a time [at dawn] I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers. ~ Bruno Schulz

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth ~ Blaise Pascal

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah. ~ Alistair Cooke

A man who will not listen carefully to advice honestly given is a fool. Of course, a man who blindly takes any advice he receives is a bigger fool. ~ Tad Williams

Sandra was fond of an old Russian saying: When a man causes you a problem, remember: no man, no problem. ~ S.M. Stirling

... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases. ~ Max Weber

They both walked to the center of the room. Jonas put his tunic back on. 'Goodbye, sir,' he said. 'Thank you for my first day.'
The old man nodded to him. He looked drained, and a little sad.
'Sir?' Jonas said shyly.
'Yes? Do you have a question?'
'It's just that I don't know your name. I thought you were The Receiver, but you say that now I'm The Receiver. So I don't know what to call you.'
The man had sat back down in the comfortable upholstered chair. He moved his shoulders around as if to ease away an aching sensation. He seemed terribly weary.
'Call me The Giver,' he told Jonas. ~ Lois Lowry

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman
known, marked, lined, familiar - -who hands him the paper every morning. ~ Naomi Wolf

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

How could I be sleeping with this particular man ... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste. ~ Margaret Atwood

The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

In any case one can never forbear to smile at such a despairer, who, humanly speaking, although he is in despair, is so very innocent. Commonly such a despairer is infinitely comic. Think of a self (and next to God there is nothing so eternal as a self), and then that this self gets the notion of asking whether it might not let itself become or be made into another ... than itself. And yet such a despairer, whose only wish is this most crazy of all transformations, loves to think that this change might be accomplished as easily as changing a coat. For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress, he recognizes (and here again appears the infinitely comic trait) he recognizes that he has a self only by externals. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...

[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness. ~ Betty Smith

He's a good horse," Bellamy said, a bit defensively. "He was always willing if you knew how to manage him. Oh, you know, like most horses, he'd get away with whatever he could, but he was never mean-tempered. Not like this."
Ash liked the fact that Bellamy stood up for his horse. "How long has he been off his feed?"
"Couple weeks."
"What's his name?"
"Crusher."
Ash raised an eyebrow. "Crusher?" At the sound of his name, the gelding's ears pricked forward.
Bellamy grimaced. "He's a warhorse, all right? Man doesn't want to ride into battle on a horse named Daisy. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

At times Leonardo was troubled by his lack of achievement. As a young man he appears to have developed a reputation for melancholia. "Leonardo," wrote a friend, "why so troubled?" A sad refrain runs through his notebooks: "Tell me if anything was ever done," he often sighs. Or in another place: "Tell me if ever I did a thing. ~ Ross King

So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Healer that she was, creator of medicines and poisons, binder of broken bones, comforter, could she take the remnants here and build them into a man again?

Doro looked at people, healthy or ill, and wondered what kind of young they could produce. Anyanwu looked at the sick - especially those with problems she had not seen before - and wondered whether she could defeat their disease. ~ Octavia E. Butler

But Time and Tide and Buttered Eggs wait for no man. ~ John Masefield

I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. ~ Jack Nicholson

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. ~ Francis Bacon

The Christian narrative states that a maximally powerful, maximally good, all-knowing aseitic being consciously created everything, including man who short-circuited shortly after. This failure resulted in the immediate separation of all earthly things, including man, from the Creator: the Middle Eastern deity named, Yhwh. The objective of life, according to the Christian narrative, is to return to communion with Yhwh. Failure to do so in a finite space of time (a single lifetime of indeterminate duration and unequal resources) will result in Yhwh tossing the individual into an abyss he created for his finest and most beautiful creation, an angel named Lucifer (Ezekiel 28:12,13), who also short-circuited sometime earlier. This is considered by Christians to be the ultimate punishment: an eternal separation from the god, Yhwh.

This narrative is wholesale nonsense.

As a theology (and scaffolding for a tremendously flawed accompanying theodicy), it is an extravagant work of self-annihilating absurdity. As a maximally good, aseitic being, everything was once part of perfection. That's what aseity means. There was no-thing that was not already perfect. To argue otherwise is to concede Yhwh was not, in fact, perfect. Creation, therefore, destroyed this eternal harmony, this purity, and by this fact alone, the act of Creation can only be called maximally evil. Creation separated things from the perfect goodness. Creation expelled goodness and cast it into a sta ~ John Zande

His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love. ~ Graham Greene

Would you like me to court you?" the earl finally asked.
YES. She smoothed her hands over her skirts to keep from confessing it aloud. "I would like to know if you are," she replied. "Or what your intentions are, if you aren't."
"My intentions . . ." His slow smile acted like a torch held to her skin. She felt prickly with heat and yet transfixed by the glowing allure of it. "I intend to have you, Maggie, in every way a man can have a woman. I want your hand in mine while we dance. I want you laughing beside me in the theater. I want you lying naked in my arms at night. And I want you standing beside me in church, saying 'I will.' ~ Caroline Linden

I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place. After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry? ~ Sei Shonagon

She took him by the sleeve and tried tugging him toward the door. Unsuccessfully.
Then she gave up on the tugging and started pushing at him instead.
That wasn't any help, either. Except, perhaps, as an aid to Logan's amusement.
He was a lot of man, and she was a mere slip of a lass. He couldn't help but laugh. But her efforts weren't entirely ineffectual. The press of her tiny hands on his arms and chest stirred him in dangerous places.
He'd gone a long time without a woman's touch.
Far too long. ~ Tessa Dare

Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it hardly mattered. The leading Danes tripped on the hidden timbers and the men behind pushed the falling men forward. I kicked one in the face, feeling my iron-reinforced boot crush bone. Danes were sprawling at our feet while others tried to get past their fallen comrades to reach our line, and we were killing. Two men succeeded in reaching us, despite the smoking barricade, and one of those two feel to Wasp-Sting coming up from beneath his shield-rim. He had been swinging an ax that the man behind me caught on his shield and the Dane was still holding the war ax's shaft as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I twisted the blade, ripping it upward, and as Cerdic, beside me, chopped his own ax down. The man with the crushed face was holding my ankle and I stabbed at him as the blood spray from Cerdic's ax blinded me. The whimpering man at my feet tried to crawl away, but Finan stabbed his sword into his thigh, then stabbed again. A Dane had hooked up his ax over the top rim of my shield and hauled it down to expose my body to a spear-thrust, but the ax rolled off the circular shield and the spear was deflected upward and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward again, felt her bite, twisted her, and Finan was keening his mad Irish song as he added his own blade to the slaughter. "Keep the shields to ~ Bernard Cornwell

For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve. ~ Rebecca West

Let every woman ask herself: "Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work notpaid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?" Let every woman ask. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

She'd shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe even more vividly human than anyone he'd ever known. And if she was, then Grisha weren't inherently evil. They were like anyone else - full of the potential to do great good, and also great harm. To ignore that would make Matthias the monster. ~ Leigh Bardugo