Best 251 quotes in «human condition quotes» category

One of the most human things that you can do is reach out for the stars knowing that you might not ever touch them; we are all perfectly imperfect, but to live knowing so is to be a fulfilled human being.

One thing that is clearer to me every day is how much we all have in common, and one of those commonalities is that we all think we are alone.

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature.

Over-thinking, a devouring monster, entice, only the inky reflections; there's a pleasure you come by, from this anomalous encounter; kills your desire, for human affection.

Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.

O what we ben! And what we come to!

Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

People nowadays talk about the world's problems like they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they're told and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

People got opinions, that's all they've got.

People have been bred to hate for generations -- eons, maybe. Some fundamental urge. Something implicit in the human condition.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Pseudo idealism: apparent charitable behaviour that on scrutiny is revealed as selfish, because the giver is engaging in it only so that he or she can feel good about him or herself

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

Quot homines, tot sententiae

Quotes are echos of voices transporting wisdom, humor, and love. Returning again to the human condition, fleeting once more as a dove.

Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are all born, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death and making sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it.

Raise your love, raise it high. Don't let the world and its circumstances make you hate.

Seeds eat no mud Stem eats no seed, Leaf eats no stem, Flower consumes no leaf Nor fruit eats flower, The fruit, quit the tree with happiness Without harming it. But the intelligent human-being, eats up all; still unhappy , hungry and ...

Remember, we're all just tubes with some fancy bits attached, looking for stuff to put in the front, and finding places to put whatever comes out the other side.

Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.

Seule l’oppression devrait craindre l’expression complète de la liberté.

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?

She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says. 'Which part?,' I ask. 'Being human.

She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

Sola la opresión debe temer al pleno ejercicio de la libertad.

Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey’s end coming?

Struggle strengthens the human bond and lightens the burden of the human condition.

The agony of being unable to answer the question of why are we the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of life. It has been our species' particular affliction or condition — our human condition.

Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script.

The first step to empathy and compassion is realising the similarities between yourself and those that are suffering; the first step to forgiveness is realising that we're all human and we all share the same capacity for fallibility and foible; the first step to growth is to recognise the value of things that are outside your current mental frameworks so that you can grow into them.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

The definition of a good story is one that remains with you long after you've turned that last page.

The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.

The human species is terrifically talented and sophisticatedly stupid

The human condition is essentially the conflict between the human need for control and a universe that provides little if any of it. Once we accept this and get into the flow of life, we are free and, paradoxically, able to get better results.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.

The more I know, the more I realize that I don't know much at all...

The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

There's no room for hate and violence in this world. We must learn to be more kind, compassionate, empathetic, and sympathetic to humanity.

There's a vast space between being simply human to being truly humane.

The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything—and this is the most cruel law—continually gets worse.

The stiller you are the calmer life is.

The very fact of being human panics us into the most grotesque play-acting imaginable; and we deal in absurdities to keep life from being a total waste, like one constant jacking-off party.