Quotes about humanity

page 32

“All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.”

“You can't have occupation and human rights.”

“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.”

“Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”

“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

“It is chronic water shortage in the body that causes most diseases of the human body.

Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj”

“It was at that moment he realized that his spirit was truly human once more. For he no longer remembered how to be alone without being lonely.”

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

“We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.”

“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

“What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.”

“The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.”

“So many humans.
So many colors.”

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

“In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.”

“Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.”

“I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.”

“I can promise you that the world is a factory.  The sun stirs it, the humans rule it.  And I remain.  I carry them away.- spoken by death”

“When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall.”

“Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.”

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

“Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure…”

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

“A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”

“God has privileged us in Christ Jesus to live above the ordinary human plane of life. Those who want to be ordinary and live on a lower plane can do so, but as for me, I will not.”

“And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.”

“Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? …Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?”

“There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed”

“One does not greet the Queen of the Seelie Court with the barbarous human 'hello'…”

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

“A woman is human.

She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man.

Likewise, she is never less.

Equality is a given.

A woman is human.”

“We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.”

“… you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”

“The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”

“When they face desperation… human beings become animals.”

“War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.”

“Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.”

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.”

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

“The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.”

“In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.”

“I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

“As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.”

“Listen to me, Jez. There's no reason for you to die-"
Wood… poison."
No it isn't! Not to humans. And you're half human. You're vampire enough to survie something that would kill a human, but you're human enough not to be poisoned by wood.”

“This may be the curse of human race. Not that we are different from one anther, but we are so alike.”

“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

“Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't under­stand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids. I didn't care if they sang to me. All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again, pulling me upward into light, to drown.”

“These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings.
Angelology pg. 32”

“There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”

“I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they'll remember we were human beings”

“Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going”

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

“I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”

“I was thinking that if what distinguishes us as humans is our stupidity, what may redeem us is our grace.”

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

“I never thought… that someone liked me… not like a demon… not like a half-demon… not even like human… just like… just like me!" -Inuyasha”

“It's useless to lecture a human.”

“This was but a prelude;
where books are burnt
human-beings will be burnt
in the end”

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”

“There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”

“We should be inspired by people… who show that human beings can be kind, brave, generous, beautiful, strong-even in the most difficult circumstances.”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

“That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.”

“You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.”

“Don't beat yourself up," said Charlotte. "True love can be so easily mistaken for other things-friendship, humane concern, indigestion…”

“A human’s love. I couldn’t wish anything better for him. Animals protect what they know. They protect what they are bound to, but humans…humans have a greater capacity for sacrifice for those who live in their hearts. (Aristotle)”

“More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.”

“The human mind has a primitive ego defince mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It's called denial.”

“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”

“The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.”

“Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.”

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.”

“Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.”

“So what if man's body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became "human" enough, the first human soul slipped into it.”

“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.”

“Human orgasm, firecracker. Vampire orgasm, blast.”

“Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every
generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”

“Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!”

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“It's a bit embarrassing… to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”

“Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.”

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.”

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.”

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”

“Man, you cannot be real," the human said softly.
"Why not?"
"You just can't."
She laughed a little. "Well, I am." He cleared his throat again. Offered her a lopsided grin.
"Mind if I ask you to prove it?"
"How?"
"Can I touch your hair?”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“Men and swords. My father said that if you put any able-bodied man, no matter how peaceful, into a room with a sword and a practice dummy and leave him alone, eventually the man would pick up the sword and try to stab the dummy. It is human nature.”

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”

“The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.”

“I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame”