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Maya Angelou 247
American author and poet 1928–2014Related quotes
“I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.”
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
Act I, scene 1, line 25 (77).
Variant translations:
I am a human and consider nothing human alien to me.
I am human, I consider nothing human to be alien to me.
I am human, therefore nothing relating to humanity is outside of my concern.
I am a man; I consider nothing human alien to me.
I am a man, I regard nothing that is human alien to me.
I am a man, I count nothing human foreign to me.
Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
Variant: The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
Source: War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869), Ch. I
“We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.”
Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)
Context: We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
Living in Truth (1986), The Power of the Powerless
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Context: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
"The Brick Moon" (1869) - Full text online http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1633
Context: Can it be possible that all human sympathies can thrive, and all human powers be exercised, and all human joys increase, if we live with all our might with the thirty or forty people next to us, telegraphing kindly to all other people, to be sure? Can it be possible that our passion for large cities, and large parties, and large theatres, and large churches, develops no faith nor hope nor love which would not find aliment and exercise in a little "world of our own"?
“It’s against the rules of humanity to believe there is nothing we can do.”
Source: Finnikin of the Rock
Source: Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972), p. 261
