Vol. II, p. 342.
The Life of Sir William Osler (1925)
19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967
“What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.”
"Affluence and Ennui in Our Society" in For the Love of Life (1986) translated by Robert and Rita Kimber
Context: What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.
“I know at last what distinguishes man from animals; financial worries.”
As quoted in The Anchor Book of French quotations, with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Guterman
Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
December 1969; quote from a talk with his audience
Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 12
Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 6
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.
Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry
