Matthew Sivieri – matthewsivieri.me

The Duality of Man

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?¹ — William Shakespeare

Full of wiles, full of guile, at all times, in all ways,
Are the children of Men.² — Aristophanes

Mankind, fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows, wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal and dreamlike.³ — Aristophanes

Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none
More wonderful than man; the storm gray sea
Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;
Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven
With shining furrows where his plows have gone
Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.

The light-boned birds and beasts that cling to cover,
The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water,
All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;
The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned,
Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken
The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull.

Words also, and thought as rapid as air,
He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his
And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow,
The spears of winter rain: from every wind
He has made himself secure–from all but one:
In the late wind of death he cannot stand.

O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
O fate of man, working both good and evil!
When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of his city then?
Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth,
Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts!⁴ — Sophocles

What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?⁵ — Blaise Pascal

The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us!⁶ — Ennius

We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.⁷ — Shakespeare

People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.⁸ — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Surely there is nothing more wretched than a man, of all the things which breathe and move upon the earth.⁹ — Homer

Reason is God’s crowning gift to man.¹⁰ — Sophocles’ Antigone

What has ruinous Time not tainted?
Our parents’ age, worse than their ancestors’,
Bore us, less worthy,
soon to bear Children
still unworthier.¹¹ — Horace’s Odes

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.¹² — Blaise Pascal

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.¹³ — Blaise Pascal

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.¹⁴ — Psalm 8

The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.¹⁵ — Matthew 26:41

But man, proud man, / Dress’d in a little brief authority… / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep. (remove?)

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / A being darkly wise and rudely great; / With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, / With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride… / Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.¹⁶ — Alexander Pope

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman— a rope over an abyss.¹⁷ — Nietzsche

Two souls, alas! are dwelling in my breast.¹⁸ — Goethe

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself…¹⁹ — Montaigne

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.²⁰ — Immanuel Kant.

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