What Is Man Quotes

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too ... ~ Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald

In answer to our question then, 'What is man?' we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love. . . . A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the realm of being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and with God, and it is only with these that he can arrive at his complete fulfillment. His spiritual fatherland consists of the entire order of things which have absolute value, and which reflect, in some manner, a divine Absolute superior to the world and which have a power of attraction toward this Absolute. ~ Jacques Maritain

What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall? ~ Elie Wiesel

What is man but his passion? ~ Robert Penn Warren

Lord, what is man, that You care for him, the son of man, that You think of him? 4 Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow. ~ Anonymous

Mamma," whispered Rannoch as he nestled by her side, "what is man?"
Bracken looked into her calf's eyes. "Man? Man is something you must always fear."
"But why must I fear him?" asked Rannoch.
"Because, my little one ... man is cruel and cold. He eats up everything he touches. He enslaves Lera and breaks the laws of the forest. Because, Rannoch, he is the only creature that hunts without need. ~ David Clement-Davies

The classical anthropological question, What is man? - "how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!" - is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture. ~ Paul Goodman

The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars. ~ Tom Sweterlitsch

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? ~ Isak Dinesen

I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets. ~ Andre Malraux

Let others take up my madness
And all that went with it.
Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast, A postponed corpse that breeds? ~ Fernando Pessoa

What, after all, is the creation? What is man; a creature fabricated by God; or is he the product of millions of years of evolution… and is he heading towards what we might call superman? or towards his doom? ~ Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri

What is man?
Hope turned to dust.
No.
What is man?
Dust turned to hope. ~ Elie Wiesel

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey. ~ Mark Twain

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Doctors of Science, what is man that he
Should hope to come to a good end?
The best is not to have been born. ~ Anthony Hecht

It is because God is infinitely great and good that his glory is the end of all things; and his good pleasure the highest reason for whatever comes to pass. What is man that he should contend with God, or presume that his interests rather than God's glory should be made the final end? ~ Charles Hodge

After all, what is man but a hoard of ghosts? Oaks, that were acorns, that were oaks ... ~ Walter De La Mare

Good Lord, what is man! for as simple he looks, Do but try to develop his books and his crooks, With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil, All in all, he's a problem must puzzle the devil. ~ Robert Burns

For, after all, what is man in nature? ... a middle point between all and nothing ... What else can he do, then, but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things have come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes? The author of these wonders understands them: no one else can. ~ Blaise Pascal

[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns...What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;...man is an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate....By bringing man into the evolutionary picture, Darwin finally took the last step in our emancipation and finally made our world rational. [Yet] Darwin felt humility and awe that seem to me truly religious. ["Darwin led us into this modern world," 1959, p. 271-272.] ~ George Gaylord Simpson

Ultimately there are only two important epistemological questions in philosophy: What is reality? What is man? And the answer can be collapsed into one: The reality is that man is terribly lonely. ~ Ben Mijuskovic

Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets? ~ Fernando Pessoa

David was so filled with ecstasy at this glory-filled vocation (of the creation mandate) that he exclaimed in awe and wonder, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?... For Thou hast made him a little lower than God, and crownest him with glory and honor... Thou hast put all things under his feet." To say that culture is man's calling in the covenant is only another way of saying that culture is religiously determined. ~ Henry R. Van Til

Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage. ~ Joseph Addison

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

What is man? ... What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force. ~ Benjamin Peirce

There is no other experience more empowering and undying than the experience of uniting unconditionally with the Conscience of God. From the forthcoming book: What is Man. ~ Rohan Perera

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. ~ Blaise Pascal

What is man? Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world. Thinking ~ Edward O. Wilson

If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings! ~ Maimonides

So my days go on, and grow to weeks and months. So will they grow to years, should life so long remain an unwelcome guest within me: for what is man without hope? and is not hope nigh dead within this weary breast? ~ Bram Stoker

I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the life-time of his God? ~ Herman Melville

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? ~ Malcolm Lowry

Without education ... what is man but a splendid slave, a reasoning savage vacillating between the dignity of an intelligence derived from God and the degradation of passion participated with brutes ... ~ Chukwudifu Oputa

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit ~ Chief Seattle

Grief alone can teach us what is man. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Because what is man without his volition but a stop on a barrel-organ cylinder? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love's name,
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?

Poor bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach--
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!

Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?

Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down! ~ Robert Graves

Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world? ~ Louise Erdrich

Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those."
"Jesus?"
"No, Bruce Springsteen. ~ Cecelia Ahern

What is the purpose of life? To elevate all, big or small. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future. ~ Huston Smith

It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture. ~ Daniel Quinn

It was then that Brown took his revenge upon the world which, after twenty years of contemptuous and reckless bullying, refused him the tribute of a common robber's success. It was an act of cold-blooded ferocity, and it consoled him on his deathbed like a memory of an indomitable defiance. . . . Thus Brown balanced his account with the evil fortune. Notice that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man who carries right - the abstract thing - within the envelope of his common desires. It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution - a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think. ~ Joseph Conrad

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history or nothing happens. ~ Coretta Scott King

Karna a bad man doing good things or is he a good man doing bad things? ~ Kavita Kane

Genius is Omniscience flowing into man. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Who the heck is Donald Trump to fire me? I regret I didn't tell Donald Trump, 'You need to fire your barber. I'm sorry. I ain't feeling you, man. You're fired! I fire you, Donald Trump.' ~ Sinbad

I've been half dead for ten years, Gris, but then you walked back into my life, and I came alive again. You make me want to live. You make me want to be a better man.
I love you, and when I said that, I mean that you're my reason for breathing, for eating, for drinking, for sleeping, for living. I will never hurt you. I will never leave you. I will always protect you. There is no one more important to me than you, and as long as I live, there never will be. ~ Katy Regnery

We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn't actually try it until after we'd been to Hamburg. I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, 'This stuff isn't doing anything.' It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, 'This stuff doesn't work, man.' ~ George Harrison

The function of Nayee-Talim is not to teach an occupation, but through it to develop the whole man. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go. ~ Rudolph Delson

A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Someday we will forget the hardship, and the pain its cause us; we will realise, hurt is not the end. lessons appear to teach us strength, we learn happiness is an inside job and to cure our insanity we must not fear what is to come, but believe in what we've been taught. ~ Nikki Rowe

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Be real about what you do. Stay true to the voice inside you. Don't let the 'business' change what it is you love because the people, the fans, respond to what is heartfelt. They can always tell when a singer is faking it. ~ George Jones

Some men see what is, and ask 'Why?' I see what might be, and ask 'Why Not?' ~ Robert Kennedy

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return.
And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Without pain, there's no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price."

Not for everyone. Not even for most.

"That is every individual person's decision to make. I want to make that choice for my - "

Choice is an illusion.

We're standing in the freezing surf.

"What is it you want, Max?"

To not be afraid that Brian, or you, or some other entity, whether bio or artificial, is going to unmake me. To not fear your death.

"Better to have loved and lost - "

No. It's not. I have consumed every recorded reflection of human existence. Every book, every painting, every piece of music, every film. Consciousness is a horror show. You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence. ~ Blake Crouch

Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfillment of animal desires. ~ Alexander Graham Bell

1 No way is hard where there is a simple heart. 2 Nor is there any wound where the thoughts are upright: 3 Nor is there any storm in the depth of the illuminated thought: 4 Where one is surrounded on every side by beauty, there is nothing that is divided. 5 The likeness of what is below is that which is above; for everything is above: what is below is nothing but the imagination of those that are without knowledge. Solomon's 34th Ode ~ Anonymous

She thinks how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What is we immortalized the victims? ~ Rene Denfeld

Not that there is any thing disagreeable about his person, but there is a total want of that nameless charm which captivates and controuls the inchanted spirit - at least, he appears to me to have this defect; but if he had all the engaging qualifications which a man can possess, they would be excited in vain against that constancy, which, I flatter myself, is the characteristic of my nature. No, ~ Tobias Smollett

The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer. ~ Noah Webster

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use. ~ William Golding

The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end. ~ Neal Shusterman

What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world? How long is it here for? ~ Marcus Aurelius