Notes from Wikiquote

Attributed to a church father in Freud's Dora; Freud seems to have found it in an anatomy textbook by Josef Hyrtl (1867), where it was attributed to a church father; it may have been invented by Hyrtl. books.google.com For Hyrtl's quotation see books.google.com. | An early similar phrase appears in a work by the 16th century philosopher Mark Antony Zimara: Quippe si se inter stercus & urinam conceptum fuisse reminisceretur [...] non utique superbiret. ("Since, if [man] remembered that he was conceived between dung and urine, [...] he obviously would not feel pride.") (Source: Problemata Aristotelis ac philosophorum medicorumque complurium, Lyon 1557, p. 154)

Variants

We are born amid feces and urine.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Augustine of Hippo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.