The same principle leads us to neglect a man of merit that induces us to admire a fool.

As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.

As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

Man is sadly retarded by allowable imperfections.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.

Man's sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.

Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man.

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.

- [...] Ne trouvez-vous pas d'une stupidité caractéristique de l'espèce humaine qu'un homme qui n'a qu'une vie puisse la perdre pour une idée ?
- Il est très rare qu'un homme puisse supporter, comment dirais-je ? sa condition d'homme...

Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.

We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit.

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!

It becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart pump, though if we reject it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman.