Revelations: Insight On The Way Of Man

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In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is

true or becomes true.

- John Lilly

 

 

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early

and the human race come to an end.

- Joseph Conrad

 

 

Everthing human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not

joy but sorrow.

- Mark Twain

 

 

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

- Ambrose Bierce

 

 

All men are equal; it is not birth, but virtue alone, that makes the

difference.

- Voltaire

 

 

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire of every

organism to live beyond its means.

- Samuel Butler

 

 

A man lives by believing in something, not by debating and arguing

about many things.

- Thomas Carlyle

 

 

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell

on earth.

- George Bernard Shaw

 

 

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a

man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

- Gustave Flaubert

 

 

You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an

apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?

- Brillat-Savarin

 

 

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long

ago.

- Hazlitt

 

 

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

- James Thurber

 

 

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the

palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

- H. L. Mencken

 

 

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

- Bertrand Russell

 

 

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers

so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

 

 

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either

charming or tedious.

- Oscar Wilde

 

 

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must

count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in

the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no

other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than

the one he forges for himself on this earth.

- Jean Paul Satre

 

 

There is an inevitable divergence, attributable to the imperfections

of the human mind, between the world as it is and the world as men

perceive it.

- J. William Fulbright

 

 

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but

by his actions.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

 

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we

must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave

a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift

will find a fitting place.

- Margaret Mead

 

 

Nature is neutral. Man has wrestled from nature the power to make the

world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the

atom; only in men's souls.

- Adlai E. Stevenson

 

 

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had

an even greater price than life. But what is that something?

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

 

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one

compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not

desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.

- E.B. White

 

 

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet;

the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the

other members.

- E.B. White

 

 

Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of

consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a

deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process

in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully

understand.

- Fredrich August von Hayek

 

 

A man gradually identifies himself with the form of his fate; a man

is, in the long run, his own circumstances.

- Jorge Luis Borges

 

 

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The

field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is

an illusion of philosophers and fools.

- William Faulkner

 

 

The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for

the sake of food or in a fight

against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing " sport " and kills

for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but

just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now

perverted.

- Gilbert Murray

 

 

The human race afraid of nothing, rushes on through every crime.

- Horace (B.C. 65-8)

 

 

One may say that evil does not exist for subjective man at all, that

there exist only different

conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the

interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the

interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it

in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one

another in the interests of good.

- Gurdjieff

 

 

Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to

land on Earth, beings who

considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be

to other animals. Would they have the right to treat you as you treat

the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?

- John Harris

 

 

Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence

of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

- Bertrand Russell

 

 

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he

will pick himself up and continue on.

- Winston Churchill

 

 

Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still

in a room.

- Blaise Pascal