Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.
Man is still an ape in that he forgets what is not ever before his eyes.
It is not important at all that we were all once an ape! The important thing is that how very much we evolved and how far we got away from the apes!
We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.
I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.
The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
If the press really thinks Obama is Lincoln, they ought to treat him like they treated Bush, 'cause that's how they treated Lincoln. His critics compared Lincoln to an ape; they called him an illiterate baboon.
It is absurd to ape our betters.
I actually liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I remember just watching it and being pleasantly surprised with that movie. I didn't think it would be as good as it was, so I love that movie.
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.
Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.
Cunning to wise, is as an Ape to a Man.
Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.
There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.
Elsa's joke Where do baby apes sleep? In apricots!
We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it. " This is all the students get anyway.
Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels.
The solution is not to reinvent ourselves, not to ape the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats.
Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.