Letters from the Earth Quotes

“As you perceive, the only person responsible for the couple’s offense escaped; and not only escaped but became the executioner of the innocent.”

“No. No creature can be honorably required to go counter to the law of his nature -- the Law of God.”

″ Man is without any doubt the most interesting fool there is. Also the most eccentric. He hasn’t a single written law, in his Bible or out of it, which has any but just one purpose and intention -- to limit or defeat the law of God.”

“The Bible has this advantage over all other books that teach refinement and good manners: that it goes to the child. It goes to the mind at its most impressible and receptive age -- the others have to wait. ”

“Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.”

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”

“What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.”

“The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws devised for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control.”

“The tiger -- yes. The law of his nature is ferocity. The law of his nature is the Law of God. He cannot disobey it.”

“It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.”

” Each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature. In some, there will be high and fine characteristics which will submerge the evil ones, and those will be called good men; in others the evil characteristics will have dominion, and those will be called bad men.”

″ It shows you that when people have left a reproachful vacancy in a contract they can be as shady about it in Bibles as elsewhere.”

“Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short cut.”

“Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. There are no accidents. All things that happen, happen for a purpose. They are foreseen from the beginning of time, they are ordained from the beginning of time.

“Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. [...] Death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

″ Man is an experiment, the other animals are another experiment. Time will show whether they were worth the trouble.”

“He is a marvel -- man is! I would I knew who invented him.”

″ It is curious -- the way the human mind works. The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is allknowing, and all-powerful.”

“Human history in all ages is red with blood, and bitter with hate, and stained with cruelties; but not since Biblical times have these features been without a limit of some kind.

“Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed --naked and pure-minded; and no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They have entered it modest. ”