Mary Roach Quotes

We are civilized human beings, but we're all animals deep down, and that creates a certain friction in all of us.

Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

The way we like to think of ourselves is not the way we look. We like to think of ourselves as more evolved than we frequently are.

People are animals, man.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.

To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

I consider how little man is, yet, in his own mind, how great. He is lord and master of all things, yet scarce can command anything.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

I know myself a Man-- Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.

But virtue too, as well as vice, is clad in flesh and blood.

Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.

Man believes himself always greater than he is, and is esteemed less than he is worth.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.

Nobody's a criminal to himself. I never play a criminal like a bad person.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.