Human Beings Quotes - Page 24

• It constantly amazes me that men and women wander the earth marveling at the highest mountains, the deepest ocean, the whitest sands, the most exotic islands, the most intriguing birds of the air and fish of the sea - and all the time never stop to marvel at themselves and realize their infinite potential as human beings.

  Matthew Kelly

  Ocean, Men, Sea

  Matthew Kelly (2015). “The Rhythm of Life: Living Everyday With Passion and Purpose”, p.16, BookBaby

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• Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.

  Andrew Bernstein

  Men, Essence, Agony

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• A spiritual sensibility encourages us to see ourselves as part of the fundamental unity of all being. If the thrust of the market ethos has been to foster a competitive individualism, a major thrust of many traditional religious and spiritual sensibilities has been to help us see our connection with all other human beings.

  Michael Lerner

  Spiritual, Religious, Ethos

  Michael Lerner (1996). “The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism”, Perseus Books

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• Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

  Herbert Simon

  Reflection, Simple, Chaos

  "The Sciences of the Artificial". Book by Herbert A. Simon, p. 53, 1969.

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• Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.

  George P. Baker

  Immature, Impulse, Humans

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• Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can’t share your burdens, can’t receive comfort, can’t confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope.

  Martha Beck

  Communication, Dark, Bridges

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• This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.

  Martha Beck

  Running, Horse, Way

  Martha Beck (2011). “Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic”, p.139, Harmony

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• Human beings take social stances, and if you’re respectful of all human beings, you have to decide what you’re going to do and why you’re going to do it.

  Mike Carey

  Respectful, Social, Stance

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• Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

  Colin Wilson

  Wall, Spring, Cutting

  Colin Wilson (1971). “The Occult: A History”, Vintage

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• Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective.

  Colin Wilson

  Mean, Glasses, Sight

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• The heart is God's most magnificent creation, and the prize over which he fights the kingdom of darkness.
  Now consider this - marriage is the sanctuary of the heart.  You have been entrusted with the heart of another human being.  Whatever else your life's great mission will entail, loving and defending this heart next to you is part of your great quest.

  John Eldredge

  Heart, Fighting, Darkness

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• Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Thinking, Effort

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• In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

  Ernst Haas

  Art, Believe, Elements

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• I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.

  Francis Bacon

  Leaving, Looks, Slime

  "The human zoo" by Gordon Burn, www.theguardian.com. July 1, 2006.

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• The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.

  Henry Miller

  Writing, Poison, May

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

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• We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, People, Giving

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• May the humanity that is within every human being be held precious. The vice that underlies all vices is that we are held cheap by others, and far worse, that in our innermost soul we think cheaply of ourselves.

  Felix Adler

  Thinking, Soul, Humanity

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• We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Forget, Muhammad

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• Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.

  Herbert Simon

  Results, Humans, Knows

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• Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive.

  John Osborne

  Alive, Humans

  John Osborne (2014). “Looking Back”, p.358, Faber & Faber

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• My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

  Henry Miller

  Regret, Effort, World

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• I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

  Henry Miller

  Artist, Thinking, Self

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

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• Every human being is a volume, worthy to be studied.

  William Ellery Channing

  Volume, Worthy, Humans

  William Ellery Channing (1849). “Lectures [on the elevation of the working classes] with selections from his writings”, p.47

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• I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.... My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts.... In these circumstances nobody should ask me to submit to an interview if by "interview" a chat between two normal human beings is implied.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Distance, Party

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• Every human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.

  John Bingham

  Parent, United States, Citizens

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