Man

Works to read

• Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates, 1950
• Characters by Theophrastus, c. 319 BCE
• On the Making of Man by Gregory of Nyssa, c. 379
• An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope, 1733-1734
• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, 1912
• Faust, Part One by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808 · Great Books
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1952
• Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
• The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, 1944
• Coriolanus by William Shakespeare, c. 1608 · Great Books
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 · Great Books
• The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, 1903 · Great Books

Passages

• I am Misanthropos and hate mankind

  — William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

• Zeus inflicted it on me, because of his jealousy of mankind

  — Aristophanes, The Eleven Comedies

• I scarce know anyone in all mankind that is wise at all hours, or has not some tang or other of madness

  — Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

• Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular

  — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• Then, I said, no man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature

  — Plato, Protagoras

• With the poet, it is gold and silver, but with the philosopher it is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind.

  — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: man, mankind, human nature, humanity. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.