Quotes on Humans

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.

It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect... It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players - more if they are moderately restless.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.