Quotessence
Home / Quotes / M Quotes

M Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All M Quotes

“Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.”

“Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.”

“Man is not a machine, ... although man most certainly processes information, he does not necessarily process it in the way computers do. Computers and men are not species of the same genus. .... No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms. ... However much intelligence computers may attain, now or in the future, theirs must always be an intelligence alien to genuine human problems and concerns.”

“Man is not an isolated island, but we live with the false notion of being an island. We are part of the whole. We are not apart from the whole. We belong to the continent, and the continent is infinite. The ego is an island,. but your being is not an island. To follow the dictates of the ego is to make a mess of your life, because it takes you away from the unity of existence. It is trying to create a separate entity, it is trying to be separate from the unity of existence. This is doomed to fail from the beginning, because it is not in accord with the law of existence. How can the three be separate from the earth? How can the leaf be separate from the tree? The moment the tree is separate from the earth it is dead. Life is being with the tree. Life is part of the tree. The larger your ego is, the more it suffocates our being, our life source. The moment you drop the ego, you are free. You are free from all imprisonments. Then the whole universe belongs to you. Then all the stars, rivers and mountains are part of you. To be in this unity is to be in joy.”

“Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.”