Brutish Nature Quotes & Sayings

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [ ... ]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. — Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered. — Jane Yolen

Be the best, but get ready to be attacked. Only mediocrity is safe. — Paulo Coelho

Those who've left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies' wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand. — Bruce Crown

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ... — Rebecca Solnit

The first gift is Strength. May you remember to call upon it whenever you need it. — Charlene Costanzo

It is precisely when we help one another that we gain our victories over corruption, but the victory is assured only when we help one another with all our strength. — Robert Payne

[To learn] is to harness Nature; to spare man all that is most physical, backbreaking, and brutish in the work of production; to make mind master over matter. — Frederic Bastiat

In any relationship there are certain doors that should never be opened. The bathroom door, for example. — Richard Jeni

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower. — Yann Martel