Quotes on Humans

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

We will learn that computers, amazing as they are, still cannot come close to being as effective as human beings. A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way. Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.

How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find. With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.

No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.

Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as a legislature, Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters, And where it is least desired, it loiters.

Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.

Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person.

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.

In writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.

Aikido is not an art to fight with enemies and defeat them. It is a way to lead all human beings to live in harmony with each other as though everyone were one family. The secret of aikido is to make yourself become one with the universe and to go along with its natural movements. One who has attained this secret holds the universe in him/herself and can say, 'I am the universe.'

You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

Lasting fulfillment is attained only through gaining insight into the core of our human nature, unleashing the power to understand, appreciate, and enjoy our lives at the deepest level.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Out of the experience of extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.

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

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender -not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.