Agreeing on the "why" takes all the romance out of everything, takes all the seduction. Seduction used to be an art. Now of course it's brutish and it's predatory and it's bad.
The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
O Judgment ! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason !
Life is nasty, brutish, and short
They whose sole bliss is eating can give but that one brutish reason why they live.
[Men's] natural tendencies, natural proclivities, are bad. You gotta rein that in. You gotta dial that back. You need to really raise your conscience level and be aware of how others see you and dial it back, because it's just too predatory, brutish, what have you.
Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
When courtesy fails, be nasty, brutish, and short.
Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman's naked soul.
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.
