Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Man.
Man - a being in search of meaning.
Plato
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
Abraham Lincoln
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
Once a man's thirty, he's already old, He is indeed as good as dead. It's best to kill him right away.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one.Know Thyself was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, Be Thyself shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply Be Thyself. That is the secret of Christ.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Und
The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable.
The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
Leo Tolstoy
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
Samuel Johnson
The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
Thomas Alva Edison
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
No one loves the man whom he fears.
Aristotle
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.
Jane Austen
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
Thomas Carlyle
We are all fools when one wise man appears.
Orson Scott Card
A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.
Mahatma Gandhi
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Victor Hugo
