Quotes on Humans

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.

Sometimes, all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Here's what I suggest," he said. "You pretend that rats can think, and I'll promise to pretend that humans can think, too.

Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it--and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together.

The fact is, I need God to help me love God. And if I need His help to love Him, a perfect being, I definitely need His help to love other, fault-filled humans.

Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.

Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence -- priceless and irreplaceable.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

There is a moon inside every human being. Learn to be companions with it.

Every step you take will feel as if you were treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow. I am willing to help you, but are you willing to suffer all this?" "Yes," the little mermaid said in a trembling voice, as she thought of the Prince and of gaining a human soul.

Yes, I'm happy, in human terms.

The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.

An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.