Showing posts with label man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label man. Show all posts

Monday, June 19, 2023

Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the power to destroy.

Washington Irving The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

Michel de Montaigne 

Thursday, December 31, 2015

It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.

 Thucydides (Book Four), The History of the Peloponnesian War

Saturday, July 27, 2013

The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life.  We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Friday, March 09, 2012

I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration ... that we have climbed out of the trees.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Friday, June 10, 2011

Ingrate, he had of me all he could have;
I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood,
Though free to fall.

Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

There is nothing alive more agonized than man
of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

Zeus, The Illiad (Book 17, line 514, Robert Fagles' translation)