A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she's never really seen into any man's heart. The soil of a man's heart is stonier.... Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can ... and he tends it.
Among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.
The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.
- Numberless are the world's wonders, but none
- More wonderful than man.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
For seeing they saw not, and hearing they understood not, but like shapes in a dream they wrought all the days of their lives in confusion.
Every man--I know this--turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he's in love.
The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.
We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe.
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