Baltasar Gracian Quotes

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

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

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves.