Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

I also doubt a man can give really clear reasons for anything.

Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.

We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

If you did everything your mind told you to do, you do some really strange stuff. You'll probably be in jail, you'll be in trouble. But, it's all about control. We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

Because reason...is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us.

Manushya (man) is a being with Manas (mind); and as soon as his thinking power goes, he becomes no better than an animal.

Unlike the animal, God has given man the faculty of reason.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.

The heart has its reasons; it's the mind that's suspect.

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.

I don’t think we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.

Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.