Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Samuel Johnson
Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next
1. "Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."
Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"
2. "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."
Edward Gibbon
Other categories: History and Nations
3. "It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree."
Charles Baudelaire
4. "Man is a tool-using animal... Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."
Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"
5. "The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil"
6. "A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journals"
7. "Seen from the moon we are all the same size."
Multatuli (Eduard Douwer Dekker), "The Oyster and the Eagle"
8. "The human face is the organic seat of beauty."
Eliza Farnham, "Woman and Her Era"
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
9. "The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself."
Saul Alinsky
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
10. "The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free. "
Henry David Thoreau, "Slavery in Massachusetts"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude -:- Law and Crime
11. "My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."
Ursula K. Le Guin
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
12. "The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life."
Blaise Pascal, "Pensées"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
13. "There are strings in the human heart that had better not be wibrated."
Charles Dickens, "Barnaby Rudge"
14. "The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him."
Jan Patocka
Other categories: Dreams and Desires
15. "That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Neil Armstrong
Other categories: Various
16. "We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."
Arthur Stanley Eddington
17. "Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."
Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick"
Other categories: Richness and Money
18. "Man is neither angel nor beast, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would play the angel plays the beast."
Blaise Pascal, "Pensées"
Other categories: Good and Evil
19. "The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget."
Sir William Osler, "Science and Immortality"
Other categories: Egoism
20. "We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below. "
Herman Melville, "Mardi"
21. "A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man’s friends are his magnetisms."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Conduct of Life"
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility
22. "Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."
Karel Čapek
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
23. "The soul is like a pair of winged horses and a charioteer joined in natural union."
Plato, "Phaedrus"
24. "God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother."
Giuseppe Mazzini
Other categories: Patriotism
25. "The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art"
Other categories: Art and Culture -:- Education
26. "Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
Francis Bacon, "Essays"
Other categories: Art and Culture
27. "It is not true that drink changes a man’s character. It may reveal it more clearly."
John Osborne, "Tom Jones"
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
28. "The essence of a man is found in his faults."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
29. "Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: God and Religion
30. "Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: Pain and Tears
31. "Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose."
Evan Esar
32. "Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned."
James Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket"
Other categories: Various
33. "The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter."
William Somerset Maugham, "The Summing Up"
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes -:- Success and Fame
34. "There are as many characters in men
As there are shapes in nature."
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), "Ars Amatoria"
35. "Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."
Gaston Bachelard
Other categories: Dreams and Desires
36. "A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake."
G. I. Gurdjieff
Other categories: Life and Death
37. "Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person."
Zora Neale Hurston, "Dust Tracks on a Road"
Other categories: Various
38. "I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence."
Jean Rostand, "The Substance of Man"
Other categories: Life and Death
39. "One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."
Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"
Other categories: Pain and Tears
40. "Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit."
Aldous Huxley, "Eyeless in Gaza"
Other categories: Health and Alcohol -:- Various
41. "Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs."
Aldous Huxley, "Themes and Variations"
42. "The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things [...] have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower."
Edith Hamilton, "The Greek Way"
Other categories: Science and Technology
43. "The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitudes."
Victor Frankl
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
44. "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
Bertrand Russell
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
45. "Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
Albert Camus
46. "The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us."
Robert Louis Stevenson
Other categories: Love
47. "We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human."
Jacquelyn Small
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
48. "So many men so many questions."
Terence
Other categories: Question and Problem
49. "I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."
Terence
50. "Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
Abraham Lincoln, "Lincoln's Own Stories"
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
Layout based on template by Darren Hester, DesignsByDarren.com
