It takes more than just a good looking body. You’ve got to have the heart and soul to go with it.
—Epictetus (55–135) Ancient Greek Philosopher
But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
—Gloria Steinem (b.1934) American Feminist, Journalist, Activist, Political Advocate
He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility.
—Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) English Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?
—Unknown
Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man—yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
—Marcus Aurelius (121–180) Emperor of Rome, Stoic Philosopher
We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.
—William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) English Anglican Clergyman, Priest, Mystic
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual’s body.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the Universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
—Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American Poet, Essayist
By association with natures enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the ‘Big Man’ described by Yuan Tsi (A.D. 210-263), one of China’s first romanticists, we ‘live in heaven and earth as our house.’
—Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese Author, Philologist
Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of man. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) British Head of State
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Satirist, Short Story Writer
It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Critic
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
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 (1905–82) Russian-born American Novelist, Philosopher
The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl’s clitoris.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
—Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) American Social Philosopher, Writer
Why am I so determined to put the shoulder where it belongs? Women have very round shoulders that push forward slightly; this touches me and I say: “One must not hide that!” Then someone tells you: “The shoulder is on the back.” I’ve never seen women with shoulders on their backs.
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971) French Fashion Designer
Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with the power to drag the soul to perdition.
—Eliza Farnham (1815–64) American Reformer, Writer
When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
—Albert Camus (1913–60) Algerian-born French Philosopher, Dramatist, Novelist
Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Writer, Poet, Children’s Books Author
The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American Journalist, Political Commentator
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
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