A Quote by Walker Percy

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

Walker Percy

Quote Topics

Angel Back Back Together Beast Broken Busted Day Down Exile Ghost Half Man Middle Monster Mythical Office Out Ripped Say Self Some Sovereign Together Waiter Walk Wanderer Which Will Worker World

Quote Author

Walker Percy
American - Writer
May 28, 1916 - May 10, 1990

The world was created because God willed it, but why did He will it? Judaism has maintained, in all of its versions, that this world is the arena that God created for man, half beast and half angel; to prove that he could be a moral being...man was given dominion over nature, but he was commanded to behave towards the rest of creation with justice and compassion. Man lives, always, in tension between his power and the limits set by his conscience.

Arthur Hertzberg

A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.

Timothy Leary

Beast?" Jane murmured. "Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.

Jean-Francois de La Harpe

A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.

George MacDonald

O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast.

William Shakespeare

There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.

George R. R. Martin

As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Algernon Sidney

Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.

Algernon Sidney

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

Boris Pasternak

Half-man, half-beast, all nightmare. The shapeshifter warrior form.

Ilona Andrews

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

George Whitefield

The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.