Human

"Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?"

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Defeates and Mistakes

Human

Truth and Falsity

"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."

Marshall McLuhan

Human

Science and Technology

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Conduct of Life"

Human

Manners and Ethics

"The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity."

George Grosz "A Small Yes and a Big No"

Human

Peace and War

"Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts."

Robert Musil

Human

"A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man."

Percival Arland Ussher "An Alphabet of Aphorisms"

Human

Life and Death

"The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million."

Arthur Koestler "Darkness at Noon"

Human

Various

"When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself."

Ryszard Kapusciński "A Warsaw Diary"

Human

Question and Problem

"Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy."

Benjamin Disraeli

History and Nations

Human

"Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man."

Mary McCarthy "Birds of America"

Human

"Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend."

Francis Bacon "Essays"

Human

"Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it."

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Human

Life and Death

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

Kurt Vonnegut

Human

Various

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

Mark Twain

Human

Normality and Madness

"There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher."

Victor Hugo

Human

Richness and Money

"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"

Human

"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

Edward Gibbon

History and Nations

Human

"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree."

Charles Baudelaire

Human

"Man is a tool-using animal... Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."

Thomas Carlyle "Sartor Resartus"

Human

"The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche "Beyond Good and Evil"

Human

"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"

Human

"Seen from the moon we are all the same size."

Multatuli (Eduard Douwer Dekker) "The Oyster and the Eagle"

Human

"The human face is the organic seat of beauty."

Eliza Farnham "Woman and Her Era"

Beauty and Ugliness

Human

"The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself."

Saul Alinsky

Freedom and Servitude

Human

"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"

Freedom and Servitude

Human

Law and Crime

"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

Human

Reality and Imagination

"The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

Human

Power and Weakness

"There are strings in the human heart that had better not be wibrated."

Charles Dickens "Barnaby Rudge"

Human

"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

Dreams and Desires

Human

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Neil Armstrong

Human

Various

"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."

Arthur Stanley Eddington

Human

"Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."

Herman Melville "Moby-Dick"

Human

Richness and Money

"Man is neither angel nor beast, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would play the angel plays the beast."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

Good and Evil

Human

"The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget."

Sir William Osler "Science and Immortality"

Egoism

Human

"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"

Human

"A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Conduct of Life"

Friendship and Hostility

Human

"Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."

Karel Čapek

Freedom and Servitude

Human

"The soul is like a pair of winged horses and a charioteer joined in natural union."

Plato "Phaedrus"

Human

"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

Human

Patriotism

"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"

Art and Culture

Education

Human

"Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

Francis Bacon "Essays"

Art and Culture

Human

"It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly."

John Osborne "Tom Jones"

Health and Alcohol

Human

"The essence of a man is found in his faults."

Francis Picabia

Defeates and Mistakes

Human

"Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men."

Francis Picabia

God and Religion

Human

"Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery."

Francis Picabia

Human

Pain and Tears

"Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose."

Evan Esar

Human

"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"

Human

Various

"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"

Defeates and Mistakes

Human

Success and Fame