M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Man works primarily for his own self-respect and not for others or for profit. . . the person who is working for the sake of his own satisfaction, the money he gets in return serves merely as fuel, that is, as a symbol of reward and recognition, in the last analysis, of acceptance by ones fellowmen.”
Source: Beyond Psychology
“Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.”
Source: Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication
“Man worships because God lays His hand to the dust of our experience, and man miraculously becomes a living soul - and knows it and wants to worship.”
“Man would be "otherwise." That's the essence of the specifically human.”
Source: Juan de Mairena
“Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
Source: The Ultimate Quotable Einstein
“Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.”
Source: The Invisible Pyramid
“Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp... If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there.”
Source: The Invisible Pyramid: A Library of America eBook Classic
“Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.”
Source: Maxims and Reflections
“Man would not have attributed to Fate
its utterly controversial reputation
were it to act upon man’s will
– for it seems totally impervious to intervention and completely unwilling, at times, to succumb even to His divine will….”
“Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose.”
“Man wrote the book on greed.”
“Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works
Must yield at length to Time.”
Source: The Works of Thomas Love Peacock: Poems and plays. 1931
“Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and mysterious object of the biographer's interest, of the historian's comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.”
Source: The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown
“Man, you see, swings between nihilism and spirituality. Man, you see, swings between utmost bliss and the feelings of utter despair. It’s a rollercoaster, our lives. One can’t just go higher, higher all the time.”
Source: The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit
“Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”
“Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery....a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.”
“Man! What are you? Who are you? Just a shadow in this universe! You always forget this and the truth will always remind you what you really are! Do you want to be a real thing, not just a shadow? Improve your science ten thousand times; improve your science hundred thousand times! If you can't improve your science, you will remain as a miserable shadow!”
“Man" Rhage muttered, "someone hit this place with the Hallmark stick." Until it broke.”
Source: Lover Revealed: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood
“Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God.”
Source: SĀDHANĀ - The Realisation of life
“Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.”
“Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.”
Source: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
“Man's actions are the picture book of his creeds.”
“Man's activity consists in either a making or doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction upon the contemplative life (that is, the Hero).”
“Man's attitude towards the universe and his opinion of the universe predates the scientific probe of the universe.”
“Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness
“Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.”
“Man's best candle is his understanding.”
“Man's best friend is a really good plan!”
“Man's best friend is his dogma.”
“Man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it.”
Source: Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation
“Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife.”
“Man's best support is a very dear friend.”
Source: Cicero in twenty-nine volumes
“Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”
Source: The Erich Fromm Reader: Readings Selected and Edited by Rainer Funk
“Man's birth is a lottery; it may be in the pleasant home of ease and affluence, or in the hut of poverty; in either case it may be a stain or an honor. If he is born in poverty, and his future life throws a lustre over an humble birth, the reward will not only be great, but his name will stand higher on the roll of honor and virtue, than he who can only boast of his proud descent.”
“Man's body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination has made him remarkable.”
Source: Recent prose
“Man's books are but a climbing stair,
Lain step by step, like stairs of stone;
The stairway here, the temple there -
Man's lampad honor, and his trust,
The God who called him from the dust.”
“Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie -
The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky;
The love of beauty, blossomed soil,
The large content, the tranquil toil:
The toil that nature ever taught,
The patient toil, the constant stir,
The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
The toil of God incessantly
By palm-set land or frozen sea.”
“Man's brain is, after all, the greatest natural resource.”
“Man's brain may be compared to an electric battery...a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery.”
“Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.”
“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
“Man's character is the product of his premises.”
Source: The Fountainhead
“Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.”
Source: Suicide: A Study in Sociology
“Man's chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.”
Source: The Power of Awareness: With linked Table of Contents
“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”
Source: Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays
“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”
Source: James and Dewey on Belief and Experience
“Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.”
“Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.”
“Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.”
Source: Johnsonian miscellanies
“Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.”