Quotes on Human Life

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed, we can't make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning -- much less set strategy for a company or for a human life. Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves. The more you understand the human condition, the more effective you are as a businessperson. Human depth makes business sense.

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life... but what is that something?

Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.

The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos

Only when we accept and forgive all that is or has been the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human lives can we get off the guilt trip and back into the flow. That means we must love our humanness and all of our failings; we must accept, learn from, and yes, even love our mistakes.

Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life.

Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business.

The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.

I fell in love with the thought that a human life could be a priestly conduit, a connecting link between earth and sky. As I grew and stumbled and, most important, as I began to love and be loved, I realized that the ultimate priest is the lover inside us

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.