The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man.
—Albert Einstein
Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.
—D. H. Lawrence
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
—Joseph Conrad
Man does not live by bread alone, but he also does not live long without it.
—Frederick Buechner
But the mother's yearning . . . feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.
—George Eliot
O, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!
—William Shakespeare
There is a difference between saying goodbye and letting go. Goodbye is not permanent. You can meet years later and share what happened in your life. You can smile and laugh about all the nonsense that you both went through. However, letting go is being okay with never seeing this person ever again…being okay with never knowing how their life turned out…being okay with fifty or more years of silence…being okay with running into that person at a grocery store and having them not acknowledge your presence. This is the part of life that doesn't sit well with me and never will. It tears my heart in pieces, robs me of gratitude, drains me of anything positive and eats at the faith that holds on.
—Shannon L. Alder
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
—Russell Baker
[The philosopher] Wittgenstein writes about a man who, not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys one hundred copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth.
—Richard Kehl
The birds are molting. If only man could molt also — his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.
—James Allen
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
—Henry David Thoreau
A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.
—Stephen Crane
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
—Jean Cocteau
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
—Mark Twain
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
—Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel