Quotes on Humans

Despite all philosophical differences, all major world religions have the same potential to create good human beings.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)

Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property...worry about becoming a human being and not about how you can prevent others from enjoying their lives because of your own inability to adjust to life.

In the human heart one generation of passions follows another; from the ashes of one springs the spark of the next.

We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

At the center of the Universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart