George Gissing Quotes

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

All history is man's efforts to realize ideals.

It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

People think that human beings have gotten worse, that because of the pressures that modern society puts on us, we've gotten worse, and we've gotten capable of doing more terrible things. I don't know if I necessarily think that that's true.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

Man's nature is fundamentally good, or perhaps it is neither good nor evil. In any case, man is something to work on. We must hold fast to this fact - man is something to work on.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.

I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained; he can be disciplined.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

History is the zoology of the human race.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

I don't think people change; electronics change, the things we have change, but the way we live doesn't change.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.