Christopher McDougall Quotes

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.

I do find that I tend to write about big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we relate to each other?

I think that our personalities and our souls have so much - we're so much more than just blood vessels and bone and muscle.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.

In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.

The essence of life, I concluded, did not lie in the material. It penetrated, but was not bound to, the physical world of science.

It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?

Some are created to love, while the others - to live.

Three things characterize man: person, fate, merit--the harmony of these constitutes real grandeur.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

The real things about man are not his body.

Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says "he focused on only one thing for his entire life!" Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society.

The worst of faces still is human.

Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.

I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

All persons who are enthusiastic that they should transcend the other animals ought to strive with the utmost effort not to pass through a life of silence, like cattle, which nature has fashioned to be prone and obedient to their stomachs.