La condition humaine [Man's Fate] (1933)
“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 4
Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Who Stands Fast?, p. 5.
Source: Empire novels (1950–1952), Pebble in the Sky (1950), Chapter 1 "Between One Footsep and the Next" (p. 6)
“If the life of a beloved woman—whether romantic partner or mother—is at risk, his life is at risk.”
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 241
“By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.”
Context: By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another … has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. … makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.
Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93
“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)
