Quotes about humanity

page 29

“it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than thesquarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

“Look on the bright side," said Simon, "If they need a human sacrifice, you can always offer me. I'm not sure the rest of you qualify anyway.”

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

“Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.”

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

“We are all human; therefore, nothing human can be alien to us.”

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

“Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?”

“Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

“If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”

“When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

“Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.”

“Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?”

“It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.”

“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”

“Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.”

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”

“Human will is the strongest will ever created. There are those who are born to succeed and those who are determined to succeed. The former fall into it, and the latter pursue it at all costs. They won’t be denied. Nothing daunts them.”

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”

“Too bad Jason wasn’t a metal automaton. At least then Leo would have some idea of how to help his best friend. But with humans … Leo felt helpless. They broke way too easily.”

“Oh come on Pam, they're funny. They're like humans but miniature… tea cup humans!”

“Strong women- precious jewels all- their humanness is evident in their accessibility. We are able to enter into the spirit of these women and rejoice in their warmth and courage.”

“The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.”

“Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.”

“… the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect.”

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

“Everyone has things they're afraid of. It's part of being human.”

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”

“What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?”

“Humm humm haaa. Rahmumm humm haaaa," intoned Opal, finishing her chant. "Peace be inside me, tolerance all around me, forgiveness in my path. Now, Mervall, show me where the filthy human is so that I may feed him his organs.”

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'… and the other twenty percent isn't very important.”

“It’s not the pain that’s inflicted on us by others that destroys us. It’s the pain we let inside our hearts that does that. Don’t let the human’s anger become yours. It can drive you mad if you do. (M'Adoc)”

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

“And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude… I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.”

“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”

“Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.”

“Oh, the humanity….
It was a wonder Rhage hadn't blinded himself with all that pop culture.”

“I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.”

“Not all monsters were three-ton reptiles with poisonous breath. Many wore human faces.”

“For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness”

“It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born Homo sapiens.”

“Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.”

“Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”

“Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.”

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

“Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.”

“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.”

“If somebody had said last week that I'd be in… involved… with a human, I'd have knocked his head off. I mean, after howls of derisive laughter. But.”

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”

“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.”

“Michael had once read to her how God had cast a man and woman out of paradise. Yet, for all their human faults and failures. God had shown them the way back in.”

“To Thetis,
Long overdue, I know, but every often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle. That is a human truth, I think. Even Peleus knew that.
-Seth”

“Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.”

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

“If, when you talk to people, they keep backing away from you, it's because you're TOO CLOSE, alright? SO DON'T KEEP ADVANCING ON THEM LIKE A HUMAN GLACIER.”

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human science is at a loss.”

“Either things happen for a reason, or they happen for no reason at all. Either one's life is a thread in a glorious tapestry or humanity is just a hopelessly tangled knot.”

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

“The assumption of time is one of humanity's greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there's always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.”

“I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.”

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

“Percy: "Hey, why do pegasi gallop as they fly, anyway?"

Blackjack: "Why do humans swing their arms as they walk? I dunno, boss. It just feels right.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.”

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

“About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil.”

“We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop.”

“I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.”

“Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history?”

“Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.”

“The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.”

“You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies.
I've seen millions of them.
I've seen more eclipses than I care to remember”

“I understand too well the dreadful act
I'm going to commit, but my judgement
can't check my anger, and that incites
the greatest evils human beings do.”

“For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being.”

“The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one
soul, and he has got dozens.”

“If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.”

“I am haunted by humans.”

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

“But life isn’t about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting your past. It’s about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes.”

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

“A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.”

“Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.”

“It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.”

“They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race. I hope it's not. We might get lucky.”

“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance.”

“Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.”

“To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.”

“The Queen touched her lips thoughtfully with a single long white finger. 'The Fair Folk, unlike humans, do not concern themselves overmuch with. Love, perhaps, and hate. Both are useful emotions. But…" She shrugged elegantly.”