Quotes about humanity

page 23

“Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are. Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home: I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.”

“The human condition: Lost in thought Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past. In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness. In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.”

“Just as the ancient sutras, the writings contained within this book are sacred and have come out of a state of consciousness we may call stillness. Unlike those ancient sutras, however, they don’t belong to any one religion or spiritual tradition, but are immediately accessible to the whole of humanity. There is also an added sense of urgency here. The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself.”

“The greatest and noblest conceptions have no image wrought plainly for human vision, which he who wishes to satisfy the mind of the inquirer can apply to some one of his senses and by mere exhibition satisfy the mind. We must therefore endeavor by practice to acquire the power of giving and understanding a rational definition of each one of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, can be exhibited by reason only, and it is for their sake that all we are saying is said. But it is always easier to practice in small matters than in greater ones.”

“We embrace this dream altogether, regardless of our class, our region, and our religious community. All these are secondary to me compared to human dignity, compared to the respect for the human being and the individual, compared to the right of the Lebanese to enjoy security, safety, and equality without any discrimination whatsoever, this is what matters to me. We must build the state of today for the year 2000, we do not want to go backward, restore and build on the remnants of the state of 1943.”

“A person, being in the orbit of developed humanism can become an unchangeable creator of higher values.”

“The complexity of the world is not revealed by its simplification in human mind.”

“True faith is faith in the immortality of Human.”

“I have learned that…
you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.
No matter how much I care, some people just don't care back.
It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.
It's not what you have in your life, but who you have in your life that counts.
You can do something in an instant that will give you a heartache for life.
No matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides.
You should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.
We are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.
There are people who love you dearly, but just don't know how to show it.
True friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. The same goes for true love.
Just because someone doesnt love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.
Maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated.
No matter how good a friend someone is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.
No matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop for your grief.
Just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.
We don't have to change friends if we understand that friends change.
You shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.
There are so many ways of falling and staying in love.
No matter how many friends you have, if you are their pillar, you will feel lonely and lost at the times you need them most.
The people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon.
Although the word "love" can have many different meanings, it loses value when overly used.
Love is not for me to keep, but to pass on to the next person I see.
There are people who love you dearly but just don't know how to show it.
Every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch-holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.
I still have a lot to learn……”

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

“Since human knowledge is not perfect, a more knowledgeable person is not always right.”

“God seems to have disappeared from the horizon, and his word no longer seems a compass guiding our lives, our basic decisions, our human and social relationships.”

“Many US journalists and politicians acknowledge that climate change is the largest threat facing humanity, but few point to the fact that the US military is the largest institutional polluter, and emitter of carbon emissions, and every single climate treaty excludes their responsibility.”

“Technology does not lead us to stars, human love does.”

“It is a human duty to measure his happiness by the happiness of others.”

“The only way is not humans to come to find the truth. Because if so, then they will get lost. How can humans find what they don't know? Therefore, humans are only possible to let the truth come knocking on the door so that they get enlightenment. They become blessed. Not by his own will, but because of the desire of the truth itself.”

“Just like water and air, connection with others is a basic human need.”

“To understand the importance of not touching a person who does not want us, to realise that it is not right to deceive someone who does not belong to us, but only out of selfishness, for the pleasure of it or for pure satisfaction is not for everyone. And above all, it means loving and respecting human worth.”

“It is fascinating the intellect of a person who always has a resource, who instead of getting down about a problem look for a solution. The mind remains the most interesting and engaging place of a human being.”

“There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair.”

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

“Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.”

“Religion, the dominion of the human mind;
Property, the dominion of human needs; and
Government, the dominion of human conduct,
represent the stronghold of man's enslavement
and all the horrors it entails.”

“You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.”

“A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.”

“I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”

“The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.”

“We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicionwork with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)”

“To reconcile the gentleman with himself, it must be imagined that he determined the human character by the points of the compass. The truth was, that all men having power ought to be distrusted, to a certain degree.”

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”

“Life is full of screwups," he said, chucking another paper at the split-level before taking the corner. "You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existence.”

“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”

“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

“But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.”

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

“In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.”

“The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!”

“The problems we face, did not come down from the heavens. They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.”

“You have qualities which I had not before supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you.”

“Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.”

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.”

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

“That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.”

“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”

“Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption … is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”

“Best way to save humanity is to turn the monsters against one another.”

“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…”

“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

“How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!”

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”

“Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

“In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.”

“Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.”

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

“Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard.”

“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.”

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”

“All that we did was human,
stupid, easily forgiven,
Not quite right.”

“I believe in the goodness of fellow human beings. We have a true desire for greatness and genuine good intention to be helpful to others. That's enough. Change is possible.”

“In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.”

“Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.”

“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”

“The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.”

“The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that
helps him get through the day”

“The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.”

“All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.”

“When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.”

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

“Sometimes," Halt continued, "we tend to expect a little too much of Ranger horses. After all, they are only human.”

“There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.”

“And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.”

“Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”

“Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.”

“Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.”

“She had a way of pouring everything of herself into what she did. When she fought, she was the blade. When she loved, she was the kiss. In that regard, she was far more … human than any I have known.”

“There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.”

“Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity.”

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

“Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”

“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.”

“The biggest human temptation is … to settle for too little.”

“He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.”

“I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.”

“I’m sorry ma’am,” I said. Really, I had no idea what else to say. I’d spent the weekend caught up in an epic battle to save humanity, and now… jean shorts?”

“Everything can be taken from you in a second, but the human spirit is so strong. War can teach you so much about evil, and so much about good.”

“Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.”

“When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”

“No human on God's earth is a nobody.”

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”

“As dull as Nate Gray is," Will said, "his head is not actually filled with gears, Henry. He's a human.”

“But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.”