To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for goals.

Man is a maker of meanings in a world that sometimes seems without meaning. Few things help us find meaning more than a cause to believe in, better yet, about which to get excited. Renewing organizations seem to run on causes.

Man is an imagining being.

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.

Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle.

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.

We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification, and those which are in power get hold of reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings from power.