"Man is broad, even too broad."

“Man is broad, too broad” is the expression of a central contradiction in human nature: the capacity to pursue degrading or shameful desire without surrendering an exalted ideal, and even to feel both with genuine intensity. The phrase does not resolve that contradiction. It makes human breadth troubling precisely because incompatible forms of beauty and desire can occupy the same heart.

The phrase in context

The expression occurs in a conversation about the mysteries that weigh upon human beings and the difficulty of making sense of them. Its speaker turns from those general riddles to beauty, describing a person of lofty mind and heart who begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. The movement is not presented as a simple replacement of one ideal by another: the ideals remain in conflict within the same person.

The speaker sharpens the paradox by insisting that someone whose soul contains the ideal of Sodom may still refuse to renounce the ideal of the Madonna. That higher ideal may continue to burn in the person’s heart as genuinely as it did in youth and innocence. Human breadth therefore means more than a range of tastes or impulses. It is the unsettling coexistence of moral and sensual visions that seem to exclude one another, yet retain real force at the same time.

Beauty and contradiction

The phrase emerges from a reversal in the meaning of beauty. What the mind regards as shameful, the heart may experience as beautiful; the speaker asks whether beauty can be found in Sodom and observes that, for the immense mass of mankind, it is. The distinction between judgment and feeling is not treated as a minor inconsistency. It exposes a fault line between what people recognize as morally elevated and what they are drawn to desire.

This reversal gives the expression its force. If the person simply abandoned the Madonna for Sodom, the conflict could be described as a fall from one ideal to another. But the continued, genuine fire for the Madonna prevents such a clean account. The heart is not shown as choosing one beauty and extinguishing the other; it can remain divided, responding to what the mind calls shameful while preserving an attachment to innocence and elevation.

The limits of resolution

The speaker responds to this breadth by wishing that humanity were narrower. The wish registers the strain of a nature that refuses to fit a single moral description: an ideal of purity does not guarantee pure desire, and the presence of degrading desire does not erase the higher ideal. The phrase thus describes not liberation from moral limits but the difficulty of holding together impulses that pull in opposite directions.

The expression leaves its contradiction open rather than explaining it away. It offers no formula by which the heart’s competing attractions can be reconciled, and it does not claim that every desire is therefore equally good. Instead, it insists that a truthful account of human beings must reckon with the gap between the mind’s judgment and the heart’s sense of beauty. Human breadth is at once a capacity for opposed ideals and a source of bewilderment: the person can be sincerely drawn toward both, without that sincerity making their conflict disappear.

Significance

As an expression, “Man is broad, too broad” condenses the conversation’s account of beauty into a memorable paradox. Its emphasis falls not on a fixed label for human character, but on the painful coexistence of aspiration and appetite. The phrase makes contradiction part of the subject rather than an error to be corrected: the human heart can preserve an ideal of innocence while finding beauty where moral judgment sees shame.

That open tension also limits what the statement can establish. It identifies a conflict between mind and heart and between the ideals of the Madonna and Sodom; it does not resolve the conflict, explain its origins, or excuse the choices that may follow from it. Its significance lies in keeping the opposing claims visible at once. “Broadness” is not presented as uncomplicated richness, but as an excess of inward possibility that can leave a person divided against himself.