Man Made Things Quotes & Sayings

What have you talked about then?" Alec didn't like how jealous he sounded, but it couldn't be helped. Ever since Charlie had come home he didn't know how to feel about her. It was impossible to just wipe out all the love he'd carried for her for so many years, every time he looked at his sons he saw her in them. He had tried to move on, he had moved on, but a part of him would always love her. Everything he had learnt about being a man, a lover, a true friend, a father; all these things he had learnt with her right by his side. She had made him her constant in a world where she had never known true stability, and he had loved her all the more for it.
But just as it was impossible to stop loving her, the same could be said when it came to hating her. He f*** ing hated her. He loved her with the same intensity of hating her. — K. Carr

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her - one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. — Herman Melville

Decided?" his mother continued with no scant irony. "He hasn't yet made up his mind, and we sail at ten o'clock!" "What does it matter when my things are put up?" the young man said. "There's no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm waiting for a telegram - that will settle it. I just walked up to the club to see if it was come - they'll send it there because — Henry James

The bodies of irrational animals are bent toward the ground, whereas man was made to walk erect with his eyes on heaven, as though to remind him to keep his thoughts on things above. — Augustine Of Hippo

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse. — Friedrich Schiller

If God made all our faces, did he laugh when he made me?
Does he make the legs that cannot walk and eyes that cannot see?
Does he curl the hair upon my head 'til it rebels in wild defiance?
Does he close the ears of a deaf man to make him more reliant?
Is the way I look a coincidence or just a twist of fate?
If he made me this way, is it okay, to blame him for the things I hate?
For the flaws that seem to worsen every time I see a mirror,For the ugliness I see in me, for the loathing and the fear.
Does he sculpt us for his pleasure, for a reason I can't see?
If God makes all our faces, did he laugh when he made me? — Amy Harmon

Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess ... — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world. — Ernest Becker

For it pleased God, after he had made all things by the word of his power, to create man after his own image. — George Whitefield

The entire world is made up of only two things, energy and matter. In elementary physics we learn that neither matter nor energy (the only two realities known to man) can be created nor destroyed. Both matter and energy can be transformed, but neither can be destroyed. Life is energy, if it is anything. If neither energy nor matter can be destroyed, of course life cannot be destroyed. Life, like other forms of energy, may be passed through various processes of transition, or change, but it cannot be destroyed. Death is mere transition. If death is not mere change, or transition, then nothing comes after death except a long, eternal, peaceful sleep, and sleep is nothing to be feared. Thus you may wipe out, forever, the fear of Death. — Napoleon Hill

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man
or scarce a man yet
the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late. — Robert Louis Stevenson

You want to hear it? Fine. It's a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn't enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn't pretty, but it also wasn't scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren't just scary, they're fucking terrifying, and I can't do it. I can't live like this, knowing all that I've ruined and that it can't be fixed. — Cora Carmack

I've definitely seen things that have made me laugh. And there's some things that are really smart and like, "Oh man, we should have done that, that's really cool!" And there's some things that are like, "Oh, do they know something? I don't know!" So there's the whole variety of things that are in those theories. But they're cool. — Dan Trachtenberg

I think one of the things about Peter Parker that is so great, and what has made him and Spider-Man last so long is he is a kid that we all feel connected to, he's not an alien, he's not a millionaire, he's just this kid that has trouble asking girls out. — Marc Webb

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. — Oscar Wilde

What a time herbs and weeds, and such things could talk, A man in his garden one day did walk, Spying a nettle green (as th'emeraude) spread in a bed of roses like the ruby red. Between which two colors he thought, but his eye, The green nettle did the red rose beautify. "How be it," he asked the nettle, "what thing Made him so pert? So nigh the Rose to Spring. — John Heywood

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions - objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

God (Nature, in my view) makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He fores one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it) ... But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize that God made it and it deserves respect because he made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe that God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing on a high level of respect. — Francis A. Schaeffer

A self-made man, if he is made at all, has already won the battle of life ... he has learned to resist. He has learned the value of money, and how to refuse to spend it. He has learned the value of time, and how the conversion of it into useful things will make of his life something worthwhile. He has learned to say no, to say no at the right time and then to stand by it. Without resistance, and the self-denial which it often imposes, there is no real happiness. In the quest for happiness man must learn that temptation resisted strengthens the mind and the soul. — Alvin R. Dyer

He hadn't known a man could want like he did. He wanted her even though she made him wish for things he'd never even considered, things he wasn't certain he even believed existed. He wanted to risk, to reach for that ever-elusive something that snaked through him whenever she set those green eyes on him. — Sarah Grimm

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? — Bill Shapiro

One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you'd be surprised - we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the black man in this country, he is still more African than he is American. — Malcolm X

But we had with us, to keep and to care for, more than five hundred bruised bodies of men- men made in the image of God, marred by the hand of man and must we say in the name of God? And where is the reckoning for such things? And who is answerable? One might almost shrink from the sound of his own voice, which had launched into the palpitating air words of order- do we call it? - fraught with such ruin. Was it God's command we heard or His forgiveness we must forever implore? — Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility. — Tucker Viemeister

Open your eyes, Mac." "What do you mean?" "Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them. He thinks you have the heart of a warrior. He believes in you. Believe in him. — Karen Marie Moning

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father. — Marcel Duchamp

Moonlight does things to a street scene that no other natural or man-made phenomenon can effect. People walk slower, their smiles lingering on contended faces. Horses that usually move along fast enough to stir up the dust off the street plod lazily in the clear, cool night. And in dark corners where people forget to look, the goons come out. — Bailey Bristol

You know, the technology was at the right place for us to build this world. The most difficult thing about doing The Croods was no doubt the building of the world. Every single thing in this film is organic. Organic things are tough. Very very labour intensive. And we have no man-made structures. You could argue that everything in this film is really an exterior. Even the interiors of the cave are exteriors. So building this world was the biggest thing of all, and the technology was there to do it. — Chris Sanders

Is a Christian- one who communicates daily with the Creator- to divorce himself from the things God created and intended man to have, and which demonstrate the fact that man has been made in the image of God? In other words, are we who have been made in the image of our creator to be less creative than those who do not know the Creator? The Christian should have more vividly expressed creativity in his daily life. — Edith Schaeffer

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world - that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. — C.S. Lewis

Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worth-while love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifice. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads men, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you" (Matt. 5:44). Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities. — Fulton J. Sheen

Our Lord tells us that the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27): it is a witness to our creatureliness, to the fact that we can rest because the government of all things is not on our shoulders, and our Lord is King over all creation. — Rousas John Rushdoony

I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully - and losing it - just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote. — William James

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch. — Graham Greene

Every service had a price. Every object a value. If someone made you a sword, you paid him the appropriate amount or traded something of equal value with him. If a man saved your life, you either paid him the amount you considered that life worth, or you saved his in return. Until either of those things was transacted, you were in his debt. It was business. And if Balthazar believed in anything with religious fervor, it was that. — Seth Grahame-Smith

The best man, then, must legislate, and laws must be passed, but these laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in all other cases retaining their authority. But when the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments an relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual. — Aristotle.

But to proceed; as in order and place, so also in matter of her Creation, Woman far excells Man. things receive their value from the matter they are made of, and the excellent skill of their maker: Pots of common clay must not contend with China-dishes, nor pewter utensils vye dignity with those of silver ... Woman was not composed of any inanimate or vile dirt, but of a more refined and purified substance, enlivened and actuated by a Rational Soul, whose operations speak it a beam, or bright ray of Divinity. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

I gather," he added, "that you've never had much time to study the classics?"
"That is so."
"Pity. Pity. You've missed a lot. Everyone should be made to study the classics, if I had my way."
Poirot shrugged his shoulders.
"Eh bien, I have got on very well without them."
"Got on! Got on? It's not a question of getting on. That's the wrong view all together. The classics aren't a ladder leading to quick success, like a modern correspondence course! It's not a man's working hours that are important
it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make. Take yourself now, you're getting on, you'll be wanting to get out of things, to take things easy
what are you going to do then with your leisure hours? — Agatha Christie

Well, it has to do with very deep things, because it might be that imagining yourself as a girl is a diminishment. But it is something that when I made "The Devil Wears Prada" it was the first time in my life, 30 years of making movies, that a man came up and said I know how you felt. I know how you felt. I have a job like that. People understand. — Meryl Streep

It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt. — Louis Antoine De Saint-Just

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. — Cormac McCarthy

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made. — Stephen Fry

Dutch beaches were known to me as man-made territories, as part of various land reclamation projects. But I was also interested in the media reality of the Moon landing. I wanted to use that event as a measure of time, to see what had happened in those thirty years - which happens to be my lifetime as well. I was born in 1967 and I remember seeing the Moon landing on TV when I was two. All those things were in play. Then it became a big production. It took five months to gather up the goodwill and make it happen. — Aleksandra Mir

It's okay to feel bad about how things went down, but it's not okay to drown in guilt and regret every day for having made decisions other people don't agree with. At some point, we all have to man up and decide to do what we have to do, despite the people around us who try to get in the way. — M-E Girard

Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father's surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan's ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. — Alice McDermott

Harrison Ford is a great actor and he's and lovely man and a great father and all of these things, I got to just meet him as a person and someone I respect as an actor.I'd never seen any 'Indiana Jones' movies or 'Star Wars' movies. My husband made me watch the Indiana Jones trilogy, I just was like fanboy Comic-Con geeked out. It was amazing I didn't show up to set with a whip and a hat. — Blake Lively

I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced. Were it possible for a man always to sorrow and yet to be pure, I would choose the sorrow if I might win the purity, for to be free from the power of sin, to be made to love holiness, is true happiness. — Charles Spurgeon

It is beyond dispute that Osiris made his worshipers dream strange things of him, and that he possessed their bodies and souls forever. There is a devilish wrath against mankind with which Osiris was for Death's sake inspired. In the cool of the evening he walked among men, and upon his head was the Crown of Upper Egypt, and his cheeks were inflated with a wind that slew. His face was veiled so that no man could see it, hut assuredly it was an old face, very old and dead and dry for the world was young when tall Osiris died.
("A Visitor From Egypt") — Frank Belknap Long

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories. — Italo Calvino

Bagger Vance: Don't make no sense is all ... Man say he don't play no golf when he out here this shade of night hittin balls off in the dark where he can't even see 'em ...
Rannulph Junuh: Yep ... Well, I've done things that have made less sense ...
Bagger Vance: As we all have ... — Steven Pressfield

Then men were not dependent upon women after all, as she had thought - women were dependent upon men. Boys were frail, boys cried, boys were tender, boys were helpless. Mary Anne knew this, because she was the eldest girl among her three young brothers, and the baby Isobel did not count at all. Men also were frail, men also cried, men also were tender, men also were helpless. Mary Anne knew this because her stepfather, Bob Farquhar, was all of these things in turn. Yet men went to work. Men made the money - or frittered it away, like her stepfather, so that there was never enough to buy clothes for the children, and her mother scraped and saved and stitched by candlelight, and often looked tired and worn. Somewhere there was injustice. Somewhere the balance had gone. "When I'm grown up I shall marry a rich man," she said. — Daphne Du Maurier

Most suits made the man. Gideon did things to a three-piece suit that should've been illegal. — Sylvia Day

Tell me about your master."
I nod. "He is eighth in line to the throne, the son of - "
"No, no," Caspida interrupts irritably. "Tell me what he is like."
"He is a gambler," I say. There is no point in lying about these things. "He is bold, but reckless. Brave, but impetuous. A man who . . . holds grudges." Pausing, I finish in a whisper, "He would risk his life to save someone else, without even thinking twice."
Caspida turns her head a bit, interest growing in her eyes. "And he sets out on a mad voyage and sails straight into a nest of jinn."
"My master is noble," I say with a smile, "but I made no suggestions as to his intelligence. — Jessica Khoury

I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble. — James M. Cain

He had the eyes of a man that had seen things. Eyes that were soulful and wise, yet vibrant and sultry. Eyes that made me want to run away, yet urged me to stay. — S.L. Jennings

All things look good from far away and it is man's eternally persistent childlike faith in the reality of that illusion that has made him the triumphant restless being he is. — Rockwell Kent

Each living creature is said to be alive and to be the same individual
as for example someone is said to be the same person from when he is a child until he comes to be an old man. And yet, if he's called the same, that's despite the fact that he's never made up from the same things, but is always being renewed, and losing what he had before, whether it's hair, or flesh, or bones, or blood, in fact the whole body. And don't suppose that this is just true in the case of the body; in the case of the soul, too, its traits, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears
none of these things is ever the same in any individual, but some are coming into existence, others passing away. — Plato

There are people,' he said, 'who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don't do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It's born in you, whether you give or take, and that's the way you are. Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it. We'd much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we're ravens and there you are. Ravens don't feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place." He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. "Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We're closer to people than any other bird, and we're bound to them all our lives, but we don't have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard. — Peter S. Beagle

Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn't. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who'd given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle's words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He'd heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who'd look at you like you weren't worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn't think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything. — Ari Berk

When I am dead
I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form
I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate". He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol, of "hatred"
and that will help him escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race. — Malcolm X

God made every man to have power to be mightier than the events round about him; to hold by his firm will the reigns by which all things are guided. — Henry Ward Beecher

To look is important. We look to immediate things and out of immediate necessities to the future, coloured by the past. Our seeing is very limited and our eyes are accustomed to near things.
Our look is as bound by time-space as our brain. We never look, we never see beyond this limitation; we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love. Then there is a benediction which no god can give. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about. If, just once, the man could understand, really comprehend the whole of the conversation, then the perfect union between male and female would be possible. But instead men and women continue to cohabit, even to love each other, without ever quite crossing over the chasm of misunderstanding between them. — Orson Scott Card

No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. — Wilhelm Reich

Over the years I have learned that "cleaning up one's act" may be far less important than consecrating one's life. It may be possible to use everything. A ruthless man may be able to open doors that a more kindly and traditionally spiritual person could knock on forever. Without judgment, many things can be made holy. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it. — Friedrich Max Muller

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy. — Diriye Osman

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice? — Elizabeth Gilbert

I was his fire, one look boiling his blood and turning him from a man who'd blush at a dirty word to one who'd make me feel like a virgin again, shying away from the scandalous things he whispered in my ear while he made me lick my come off his fingers. — Nicole Castle

An increased power of reflection like an increased knowledge only adds to man's affliction, and above all it is certain that for the individual as for the generation no task is more difficult than to escape from the temptations of reflection, simply because they are so dialectical and the result of one clever discovery may give the whole question a new turn, because at any moment reflection is capable of explaining everything quite differently and allowing one some way of escape; because at the last moment of a reflective decision reflection is capable of changing everything
after one has made far greater exertions than are necessary to get a man of character into the midst of things. — Soren Kierkegaard

It reminded him of the Sound of Music. Myron liked the ole Julie Andrews musical well enough. who didn't? but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics, actually. My Favorite Things. The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells for crying out loud.
You know what, Milly, I love doorbells. To hell with strolling on a quiet beach, or reading a great book, or making love or seeing a broadway musical. Doorbells, Milly, doorbells really punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people's houses and press their doorbells and, well, I think i am man enough to admit I shutter. — Harlan Coben

Since God knows created beings as the realizations of His will, it is not being itself but the ultimate will of God's love which unifies beings and points to the meaning of being. And precisely here is the role of the incarnation. The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God's love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. All things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occurred. Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for he represents the ultimate unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with His own life, to know Him and itself within this communion-event. — John D. Zizioulas

Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed. — Elizabeth Strout

Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. — Francis Schaeffer

You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of man who worked the sheath of this dagger ... You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own. — Rosemary Sutcliff

I was having trouble with the scale of things. A man killed with a musket was just as dead as one killed with a mortar. It was just that the mortar killed impersonally, destroying dozens of men, while the musket was fired by one man who could see the eyes of the one he killed. That made it murder, it seemed to me, not war. How many men to make a war? Enough, perhaps, so they didn't really have to see each other? — Diana Gabaldon

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.
Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.
It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.
And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not. — Clifford D. Simak

Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them ... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all. — Chief Luther Standing Bear

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible," he said. He then made his point with the simple example of a taste for strawberries. "There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live ... The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has. — Terryl L. Givens

And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?'

'Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.'

'But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.

'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An unlearned person doesna ken what to think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face. Inquire into the thing that is not! Na, na, we just let it be.' ("The Open Door") — Mrs. Oliphant

When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, "whenever man is made the center of things, he becomes the storm-center of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains ... You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause ... When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone - the bones, they sing joy and the work returns to it's purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness. "The work we do is only our love for Jesus in action" writes Mother Theresa. "If we pray the work ... if we do it to Jesus, if we do it for Jesus, if we do it with Jesus ... that's what makes us content." Deep joy is always in the touching of Christ - in whatever skin He comes to us in. Page 194 — Ann Voskamp

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died. — C.S. Lewis

I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand. — John Harvey Kellogg

Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. The LORD said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them. — Anonymous

For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man, people have been waiting for me to fall off my whole career. From the first time I stepped on the court. It probably made people sick to their stomachs watching my whole career, watching the things that I've done in my career. — Allen Iverson

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age ... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy,intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder ... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. — Oscar Wilde

God who doesn't know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn't yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn't know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say "I am that I am" without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived "in order to see" that is God's, the first stroke of time, before time, God's exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy. — David Wills

It is because God is infinitely great and good that his glory is the end of all things; and his good pleasure the highest reason for whatever comes to pass. What is man that he should contend with God, or presume that his interests rather than God's glory should be made the final end? — Charles Hodge

A lady?' Jem raised his head. His face as scarlet. 'After all those things she said about you, a lady?'
'She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different than mine, maybe ... son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head I'd have made you go read to her-I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see through it no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.' (p.112) — Harper Lee

I have never thought you weren't good enough for me. The fear I always had, deep down in my heart, is that I'm not good enough for you."
Murmurs of astonishment rippled through the room but he didn't seem to notice.
"You see, I was never the one who could make you laugh." He glanced at Lawrence, then back at her.
"I was never the one who made coronets of rosebuds for your hair and told you that you were pretty."
He swallowed hard, and his chin lifted a notch, telling her as clearly as any word how difficult it was for him to reveal himself this way.
"I always wanted to say those things, do those things, but I couldn't, for a gentleman is not supposed to behave that way. A gentleman is not supposed to fall in love with the chef's daughter. But right now, today, I don't give a damn what gentlemen do. I'm just a man, and the only thing I care about is you. — Laura Lee Guhrke

No man is an island," he says. "Islands are made of dirt and rocks and trees. I don't know any people made of such things. Therefore, people are not islands. — Andrew Shaffer

Lucretia Jane Price. A sweet name for a sweet lady that smelled of roses, spoke with a sweet drawl, and was surely made of all the sweet country things a man who hadn't eaten a good meal in a long time could imagine
molasses, sweet peas, sweet corn, freshly churned butter. — Linda Leigh Hargrove

I wanted a guy who made my stomach flutter, who was polite and respectful to everyone because he didn't think of anybody as beneath him, a man who did good things not because of what he'd gain but simply because it was the right thing to do. I wanted someone that cared about the injustices of the world and tried to help even if the issue didn't affect his life. — Skyla Madi

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total ... Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself. — Erich Fromm

I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again. — Gillian Flynn

Now that they were in the light, they were transparent
fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they always had been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men are ghosts by comparison. — C.S. Lewis

Humans who spend time in the wilderness, alone, without man-made mechanical noise around them, often discover that their brain begins to recover its ability to discern things. — Robert Anderson