“The man that blushes is not quite a brute.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VII, Line 496.
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Edward Young 110
English poet 1683–1765Related quotes
“It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man;”
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.
Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 11
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
“Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.”
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXVII
Following the Equator (1897)
“But sad as angels for the good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in.”
Part II, line 357
Pleasures of Hope (1799)
Letter to Abigail Adams (29 October 1775), published Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, Vol. 1 (1841), ed. Charles Francis Adams, p. 72
1770s
Context: Human nature with all its infirmities and depravation is still capable of great things. It is capable of attaining to degrees of wisdom and goodness, which we have reason to believe, appear as respectable in the estimation of superior intelligences. Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing. Newton and Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.
“Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.”
20 August 1833
Table Talk (1821–1834)
“Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state.”
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: 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.