On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
“How true it is when they say there is nothing which makes a man more furious than the discovery that he has deceived himself!”
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)
Source: Book 1, Chapter 4 (p. 509)
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Michael Moorcock 224
English writer, editor, critic 1939Related quotes
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
"The Contest in America," Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862); later published in Dissertations and Discussions (1868), vol.1 p. 26
Context: War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 92
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)
“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”
Mark Twain and I by Opie Read
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
No Exit (1944)
Variant: A man is what he wills himself to be.
Source: Existentialism and Human Emotions
“A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.”
L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même.
Book I, Ch. 39
Essais (1595), Book I
1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)