Top 79 Man Against Himself Quotes
#1. It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.
Emile Durkheim
#2. In running it is man against himself, the cruelest of opponents. The other runners are not the real enemies. His adversary lies within him, in his ability with brain and heart to master himself and his emotions.
Glenn Cunningham
#3. To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. Man has his being in truth
if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying
but of acting against one's conviction.
Novalis
#5. One does not, I think, kill oneself without a definite desire to do so. It is hardly ever an act to which a man must key himself up; it is a temptation which he must struggle against.
Geoffrey Household
#6. Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when man is angelic too?
Salman Rushdie
#7. The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.
Andre Malraux
#8. Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.
Johan Huizinga
#9. Dad has always said that a man who raises a hand against a female lowers himself beneath her feet.
Erin Watt
#10. Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.
Allan Bloom
#11. However, if you look at the matter more closely, you will scarcely call it greatness of soul, which prompts a man to kill himself rather than bear up against some hardships of fortune, or sins m which he is not implicated.
Augustine Of Hippo
#12. I think these things [firearms] were invented by Satan himself, for they can't be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming.
Martin Luther
#13. A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
T.E. Lawrence
#14. A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.
Samuel Johnson
#15. No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.
Charlotte Bronte
#16. So long as a man knows the meaning of fear, he will need the ways and means to defend himself against that fear.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#17. No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.
John Stott
#18. A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Alexandre Dumas
#19. 'I Am Legend' is quite unusual for its time. I just wanted to write a story about female boxers, and I couldn't get that going in my mind. I don't know exactly where the idea of just a man pitting himself against a robot boxer came from.
Richard Matheson
#20. But man should abstain from judging his innocently cruel fellow creatures, for even if nature sometimes "shrieks against his creed", what pain does he himself not inflict upon the living creatures that he hunts for pleasure and not for food?
Konrad Lorenz
#21. Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.
Plato
#22. For if God Himself became man, this man, what else can this mean but that He declared himself guilty of the contradiction against Himself
Karl Barth
#23. Every law that God has given has been for man's benefit. If man breaks it, he is not only rebelling against God; he is hurting himself.
Billy Graham
#24. When a king sets himself to bandy against the highest court and residence of all regal powers, he then, in the single person of a man, fights against his own majesty and kingship.
John Milton
#25. Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.
Victor Hugo
#26. He is senseless who would match himself against a stronger man; for he is deprived of victory and adds suffering to disgrace.
Hesiod
#27. Whenever a man undergoes a considerable change, in consequence of being observed by others, whenever he assumes another gait, another language, than what he had before he thought himself observed, be advised to guard yourself against him.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#28. A man who is truly humble is not troubled when he is wronged and he says nothing to justify himself against the injustice, but he accepts slander as truth; he does not attempt to persuade men that he is calumniated, but he begs forgiveness.
Isaac Of Nineveh
#29. He who receives a great many letters demanding answer, sees himself as if engaged in a hopeless struggle of one man against the rest of the world.
Anna C. Brackett
#30. A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it
Michel De Montaigne
#31. So I am about to be a free man again, to wander where I please.
I find the prospect nauseating.
I think that tonight I will hand Howard W, Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself.
Kurt Vonnegut
#32. Man is very well defended against himself ... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. [The] love of God that reaches to wherever man is, can be entirely rejected. God will not force Himself upon anyone against his will. It is your part to believe. It is your part to receive. Nobody else can do it for you.
Billy Graham
#34. His[Jesus'] death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
#35. Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
H.G.Wells
#36. Wherefore when a man giveth out his money upon condition that be may not demand it back until a certain time to come, he certainly may take a compensation for this inconvenience which he admits against himself.
William Petty
#37. What is character, if not a man's measure of himself against his friends and enemies?
Christopher Moore
#38. Consequently there is a need for spiritual vitality. What protection is there against the danger of organisation? Man is once more faced with the problem of himself. He can cope with every danger except the danger of human nature itself. In the last resort it all turns upon man.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#39. There is nothing against which an old man should be so much upon his guard as putting himself to nurse.
Samuel Johnson
#40. The very God whom we have offended has Himself provided the way whereby the offense has been dealt with. His anger, His wrath against sin and the sinner, has been satisfied, appeased and He therefore can now thus reconcile man unto Himself.
David Lloyd-Jones
#41. He was already fifty years old, the age at which an intelligent and worldly man of means always becomes more respectful of himself, sometimes even against his own will.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#42. As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#43. A man who works evil against another works it really against himself, and bad advice is worst for the one who devised it
Hesiod
#44. I remembered a definition of chivalry I'd heard once: a man protecting a woman against every man but himself.
James Anderson
#45. Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.
Irene Nemirovsky
#46. How man evolved with such an incredible reservoir of talent and such fantastic diversity isn't completely understood ... he knows so little and has nothing to measure himself against.
Edward T. Hall
#47. The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.
Ida B. Wells
#48. It demonstrates to his simple mind in the most positive manner that we have no prejudice against him on account of his race, and that while he behaves himself he will be treated the same as a white man.
George Crook
#49. A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again
Simone Weil
#50. When man ventures into the wilderness, climbs the ridges, and sleeps in the forest, he comes in close communion with his Creator. When man pits himself against the mountain, he taps inner springs of his strength. He comes to know himself.
William O. Douglas
#51. Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Lawrence Durrell
#52. A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#53. Whoever appeals to the law against his fellow man is either a fool or a coward. Whoever cannot take care of himself without that law is both. For the wounded man shall say to his assailant, 'If I live, I will kill you; If I die, you are forgiven.' Such is the rule of honor.
David Stocker
#54. Never let a man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul. The evil effect on himself is certain.
Robert Southey
#55. The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized ... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm ... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us.
Erwin Griswold
#56. The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.
Adam Smith
#57. It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself - loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.
Nelson Algren
#58. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Rachel Carson
#59. Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#60. A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.
Henry Ward Beecher
#61. In vain I have looked for a single man capable of seeing his own faults and bringing the charge home against himself.
Confucius
#62. A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
Thomas Carlyle
#63. If all the sins of the flesh are worthy of condemnation because by them man allows himself to be dominated by that which he has of the animal nature, much more deserving of condemnation are the sins against nature by which man degrades his own animal nature ...
Thomas Aquinas
#64. That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
Thomas Hobbes
#65. Golf is the only sport I know of where a player pays for every mistake. A man can muff a serve in tennis, miss a strike in baseball, or throw an incomplete pass in football and still have another chance to square himself. In golf, every swing counts against you.
Lloyd Mangrum
#66. No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#67. I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination.
Mahatma Gandhi
#68. If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.
William Graham Sumner
#70. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past.
Tom Stoppard
#71. An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.
Alan K. Simpson
#72. I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#73. Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#74. When one looks back over human existence however, it is very evident that all culture has developed through an initial resistance against adaptation to the reality in which man finds himself.
Beatrice M. Hinkle
#75. A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.
Lysander Spooner
#76. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
Alan W. Watts
#77. Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.
Mark Twain
#78. Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#79. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?
Virginia Woolf
