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Where is human nature so weak as in the
bookstore?
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-Henry Ward Beecher
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*For such is the stuff that
man is made of: in principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong
one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
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-Jeremy Bentham
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation, 1789
Chapter I, "Of the Principle of Utility", 12
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The happiness of the bee
and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it.
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-Jacques Cousteau
(cf. ANIMALS : Butler)
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*For it's human nature. . .to
be selfish and to our own advantage to be selfish, unless we get caught.
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-A. L. Herman
The Ways of Philosophy, 1990
Ch. 4 : The Way of Justice, "Republic: A Best Place That Is No Place", "The
Ring of Gyges"
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For we are so much alike that if we know what
we do and upon what grounds--when we think, reason, hope, fear--we learn at
the same time why others behave as they do.
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-Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan, 1651
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~Do you know what the
foundation of mathematics is? The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If
anyone asks me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice
and numbers. And do you know why? Because the number system is like human
life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and
positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The
child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical
expression is for longing ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the
feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and
grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces. Between
stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between
numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole
numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers. And human consciousness
doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as
absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers ... It's
a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be
written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by
adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers ... It
doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real
numbers with the imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are
numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot
comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we
have the complex number system. The first number system in which it's
possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a
vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them and they keep
receding.
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-Smilla Jasperson, a character in Peter Høeg's
Smilla's Sense of Snow, 1992
Tiina Nunnely, trans.
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Animals can learn, but it is not by learning
that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become
what he is supposed to be.
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-Eric Hoffer
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It is silly to go on pretending that under the
skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are
all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
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-Henry Miller
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Then Man was born: . . . though all other
animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to Man an
uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to heaven.
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-Ovid
Metamorphosis
Qtd. in Carl Sagan's
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever"
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*[I]t is beyond the power
of human nature to achieve skill without any experience . . .
(hoti hê anthrôpinê phusis asthenestera ê labein technên hôn an êi
apeiros. . .)
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-The character Socrates, in Plato's
Theaetetus, 360 BC
149c
F.M. Cornford, trans., 1957
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*[H]omo sapiens is
human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of
question marks, when it has nothing but exclamation points, periods, and
commas.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-First Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*A human being is like a
novel: until the last page you don't know how it will end. Or it wouldn't
be word reading. . . .
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- I-330, a hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-Eighth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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