“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.
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José Martí 103
Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader 1853–1895Related quotes

“There was no middle state. A man must be of the highest rank or live miserably.”
Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6
Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668)

“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.

Letter to William Short http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fears-people-there-libertyquotation (1825)
1820s

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“Man must first live before he can live abundantly.”
In Place of Fear (William Heinemann Ltd, 1952), p. 40
1950s

“The man that blushes is not quite a brute.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VII, Line 496.