human Quotes

“Man is the creature he fears.”

″‘I’ll get bigger and bigger and bigger till I turn into a human.’ ‘Actually, you’re a human already,’ says Ma. ‘Human’s what we both are.’ I thought the word for us was real.”

“His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing—man, woman, or stray cat…you are meeting your ‘other end.’ The universe is a thing we whipped up among us and agreed to forget the gag. Jubal looked sour. ‘Solipsism and pantheism. Together they explain anything. Cancel out any inconvenient fact, reconcile all theories, include any facts or delusions you like. But it’s cotton candy, all taste and no substance—as unsatisfactory as solving a story by saying: ‘—then the little boy fell out of bed and woke up.‘”

“She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake. ”

“Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.”

“In bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

“aOh, I see . . . I don’t count here no more. You ain’t got to say excuse me to your daddy. All of a sudden you done got so grown that your daddy don’t count around here no more. . . . You done got so grown to where you gonna take over. . . . You gonna wear my pants.”

“Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. ”

“Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”

″ The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others. ”

“Stranger fiends hide here in human guise than reside in the valleys of Hell. But goodness, kindness and love arise in the heart of the poor beast, as well.”

“A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it.”

“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette, and never see the great soul in a man’s face.”

“i’m only human, & inadequacy is what makes us human, & if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you might as well go on & forgive me pretty baby, cause i’m sorry”

“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

“For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters. Don’t waste time on false constructs.”

“I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick to such a building! […] Perhaps the thing I resented was, that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not put out one’s tongue. On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut off out of gratitude if things could be so arranged that I should lose all desire to put it out. ”

“You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. ”

“With more people on earth today, there are fewer Noodly Appendages to go around, so we each receive less touching--pushing down toward the earth--and thus, with less force downward, we’re taller.”

“For any human being in existence to think that there is nothing in the whole world superior to himself would be an insane piece of arrogance.”

″A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

“Everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.”

“You’re only human. And as humans, we can’t expect to shoulder all of our pain.”

“How can one fail to realize that in this vulnerable universe everything that is human and solely human assumes a more vivid meaning?”

“Always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!”

“Your human joy fascinates me-the way you experience things, in your life span, so wildly and deeply and all at once, is... entrancing. I’m drawn to it, even when I know I shouldn’t be, even when I try not to be.”

“Yet, desires and and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints;”

“Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”

“He watched and recorded their subversive activities with love, amusement, and detachment.”

“We are fragile creatures, and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we discover the possibility of pure joy.”

“When we see these things (suffering), we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.”

“Lord, give them enough hurts to keep them human and enough failures to keep their hands clenched tightly in Yours.”

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”

“That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human.”

“I said it was a brutal thing.” “No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.”

“In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.”

“An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.”

″...if there was one race the People felt an affinity for it was the Irish. Perhaps it was their eccentricity, perhaps their dedication to the craic, as they called it. And if the People were actually related to humans, as another theory had it, odds are that the Emerald Isle was where it started.”

“Root tilted his polymer wings, hugging the underside of a fogbank. There was no need to be careful. With his shield activated, he was invisible to the human eye. Even on stealth-sensitive radar he would be no more than a barely perceptible distortion. The commander swooped low to the gunwales. It was an ugly craft, this one. The smell of death and pain lingered in the blood swabbed decks. Many noble creatures had died here, died and been dissected for a few bars of soap and some heating oil. Root shook his head. Humans were such barbarians.”

“The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.”

“Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.”

“Psychologist William James said that possibly the deepest human need is the need to feel appreciated.”

“But if, once we return to the real world of human choice, we choose to be kind and generous, that is real love.”

“Even though we were all two who lived as one in the beginning, even though we were all connected, so humans are severed from the cord and fall into this life.”

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere. I didn’t ask to be born a King, and I am not perfect. I am only human.”

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

“A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”

“Whatever human endeavor we choose, as long as we live our truth, it is success.”

“the natural condition of the human ego: that it is empty, painful, busy and fragile.”

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”

“When our God fails to respond in the ways we expect, we humans tend to respond in one of two ways. We either blindly intensify our acts of worship or lash out in righteous anger.”

“Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”

“In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual’s life energy. Humans connect with humans. Hiding one’s humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting.”

“People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.”

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

“We all have a purpose,” she said. “Some people are the tall oak trees, and some people are the beautiful bushes. But everyone has a purpose. There is nobody here on earth who doesn’t have a path or a purpose. An innate destiny. Every human being who comes, comes called.”

“It’s like seeing her for the first time: the human behind the maji. Fear embedded in the pain. Tragedy caused in Father’s name.”

“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”

“Why do I not have an immortal soul! […] I would give all my three hundred years of life for only one day as a human being if, afterward, I should be allowed to live in the heavenly world

“If a man should fall so much in love with you that you were dearer to him than his mother and father… and he let a priest take his right hand and put it in yours, while he promised to be eternally true to you, then his soul would flow into your body and you would be able to partake of human happiness. He can give you a soul and yet keep his own”

″ ‘But if you take my voice,’ said the little mermaid, ‘what will I have left?’ ‘Your beautiful body,’ said the witch. ‘Your graceful walk and your lovely eyes. Speak with them and you will be able to capture a human heart.’ ”

“I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.”

“It can be hard even if you’re really big. But you can know a little bit anyway. For example, all plants, animals and human have to die in the end. It’s important to make room on the earth for the new ones that are born and starting to grow.”

“For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.”

“Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person...”

″ ‘When I was alive and had a human heart,’ answered the statue, ‘I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter.’ ”

“We stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.”

“Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.”

“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.”

“The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.”

“Many of us still think our value as a human being is in what we do or what we don’t do, rather than who we are.”

“It’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

“Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”