“There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”

The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)
Context: It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VII, Line 496.

20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: Man is not an image engraved on a silver dollar, with covetous eyes, licking lips and a diamond pin on a silver dickey. Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 132
Context: Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that Man, is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 80.
Context: Religion is a link between God and man and man and man. Political ideology is a link between man and man. For this reason the great religions of the world like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the last of all religions, have outlived and outlasted political ideologies. If an unlearned adventurer in his quest for political power and perpetuation brings religion down from its celestial plane to a mundane level by converting it into a narrow political ideology, the adventurer endangers the link between God and man and man and man.

Source: The Book Thief

Source: The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, Centenary Edition 1990, p. 17.