Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III
Variant: Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
“Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.”
“I really wish I was less of a thinking man and more of a fool not afraid of rejection.”
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787)
1780s
Variant: Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Source: Journey to the End of the Night
Systematic Theology (1951–63)
Context: Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing. Man is totally concerned about the totality which is his true being and which is disrupted in time and space. Man is unconditionally concerned about that which conditions his being beyond all the conditions in him and around him. Man is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents.
“I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.”
“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”
Variant: for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.”
Source: The Call of the Wild
“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
Source: The League of Frightened Men
“What is the quality you most like in a man?
The ability to return books.”
Source: Passion and Purity
“A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.”
“We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
“In my sentences I go where no man has gone before.”
“A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.”
Source: Imajica
“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”
Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature
Context: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
Context: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
“It's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”
Comments on a passage in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak, as quoted by Bill Moyers in "NOW with Bill Moyers", PBS (12 March 2004) http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”
Source: On Suicide
“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
Act III http://books.google.com/books?id=3wAOAQAAMAAJ
Source: 1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
“I have to tell you, man, that my stalker meter is kind of registering in the red zone right now.”
Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Original text: Les despotes eux-mêmes ne nient pas que la liberté ne soit excellente ; seulement ils ne la veulent que pour eux-mêmes, et ils soutiennent que tous les autres en sont tout à fait indignes. Ainsi, ce n'est pas sur l'opinion qu'on doit avoir de la liberté qu'on diffère, mais sur l'estime plus au moins grande qu'on fait des hommes ; et c'est ainsi qu'on peut dire d'une façon rigoureuse que le goût qu'on montre pour le gouvernement absolu est dans le rapport exact du mépris qu'on professe pour son pays.
Ancien Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution) (fourth edition, 1858), de Tocqueville, tr. Gerald Bevan, Penguin UK (2008), Author’s Foreword :
1850s and later
Variant: We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
Context: Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
“The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
Source: The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Source: Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
An explanation of relativity which he gave to his secretary Helen Dukas to convey to non-scientists and reporters, as quoted in Best Quotes of '54, '55, l56 (1957) by James B. Simpson; also in Expandable Quotable Einstein (2005) edited by Alice Calaprice
William Hermanns recorded a series of four conversations he had with Einstein and published them in his book Einstein and the Poet (1983), quoting Einstein saying this variant in a 1948 conversation: "To simplify the concept of relativity, I always use the following example: if you sit with a girl on a garden bench and the moon is shining, then for you the hour will be a minute. However, if you sit on a hot stove, the minute will be an hour." ( p. 87 http://books.google.com/books?id=QXCyjj6T5ZUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q&f=false)
In the 1985 book Einstein in America, Jamie Sayen wrote "Einstein devised the following explanation for her [Helen Dukas] to give when asked to explain relativity: An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour." ( p. 130 http://books.google.com/books?ei=yma3TsDWK8WciQL63smAAQ&ct=book-thumbnail&id=vs3aAAAAMAAJ&dq=sayen+%22einstein+in+america%22&q=pretty+girl#search_anchor)
Attributed in posthumous publications
Variant: When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Letter to Phyllis Wright (January 24, 1936), published in Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children (Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 129
1930s
Source: The Bride and the Beast
Strength to Love, p. 25
1960s, Strength to Love (1963)
Context: The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.
Source: Lover Revealed
Chap. 11, "The Fat Man"
Dialogue between the characters Kasper Gutman (the "fat man") and Sam Spade.
Source: The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Context: "We begin well, sir," the fat man purred … "I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does. … Well, sir, here's to plain speaking and clear understanding. … You're a close-mouthed man?"
Spade shook his head. "I like to talk."
"Better and better!" the fat man exclaimed. "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice."
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Source: The Golden Lily
“To many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth.”
Source: Powder And Patch
“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”
Liberty.
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. IX
Voluntaries
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Emerson: Poems
“What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.”
Source: Fool's Fate
Source: Dark Needs at Night's Edge
“A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.”
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha
