No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.
It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.
The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
We may be human, but we're still animals.
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
A man is known to be mortal by two things, Sleep and Lust.
Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
No living being is held by anything so strongly as by its own needs. Whatever therefore appears a hindrance to these, be it brother, or father, or child, or mistress, or friend, is hated, abhorred, execrated.
Human nature refers to what is in people but which they cannot study or work at achieving.
I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.
Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
We don't invent our natures. They're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else.
We are born with our eyes closed and our mouths open, and we spend our whole lives trying to reverse that mistake of nature.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.
We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.
But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
Man is guided by the stomach. He walks and the stomach goes first and the head afterwards. Have you not seen that? It will take ages for the head to go first.
Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.
All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
You're born absolutely free except for laws of nature, if you drink you get drunk, that's a law, if you get old you die, that's a law too; if you sit on a tack you will bleed from the ass, these are the only laws that you're born with.
I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.
