“Disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.”
volume I, chapter III: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals — continued", page 105 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=118&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)
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Charles Darwin 161
British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by… 1809–1882Related quotes

Interview with Rynn Berry in The Vegetarians https://books.google.it/books?id=vK_uAAAAMAAJ (1979), p. 64<!-- Brookline, MA: Autumn Press -->
Context: Man is innately a creature of love. That love is the most powerful force in the universe, and eventually — it's a very slow process — it will conquer. I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets hims apart
From every other creature
On earth.”
Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 1 Plant Breeding

“A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.”
"Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231.
Context: A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence.

“sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.”
Source: Letters to Milena