Human Condition Quotes - Page 13

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

  Milan Kundera

  Kitsch, Matter, Scorn

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• The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Winning, Forever, Battle

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• There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

  Ralph Ellison

  Reality, Fairy Stories, Leaving

  National Book Award Acceptance Speech, www.nationalbook.org. 1953.

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• I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.

  Albert Ellis

  Thinking, Unfair, Screwed Up

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• The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

  Quentin Crisp

  Teenage, Parent, Copying

  The Naked Civil Servant ch. 19 (1968)

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• Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.

  Alexis Carrel

  Believe, Pride, Thinking

  "Saiva Siddhanta" by Saiva Siddhanta Mahasamajam, volume 21, p. 59, 1986.

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• I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

  Octavia Butler

  Wall, Fiction, Hem

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• Without a doubt, stem cell research will lead to the dramatic improvement in the human condition and will benefit millions of people.

  Eli Broad

  Cells, People, Doubt

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• I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings.

  Kevin Bacon

  Believe, Sadness, Thinking

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

  Margaret Atwood

  Revenge, Civilization, Debt

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• You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Cities, Perspective, Poverty

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• A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

  Will Self

  Thinking, Stories, Vignettes

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• All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

  William Shakespeare

  Birthday, Time, Player

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 7, l. 139

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

  Ernest Becker

  Analysis, Existentialism, Problem

  Ernest Becker (2014). “The Denial of Death”, p.79, Souvenir Press

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• Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.

  Voltaire

  Country, War, Greatness

  Voltaire (1949). “The portable Voltaire”

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• Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.

  Flann O'Brien

  Eye, Suffering, Looks

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• I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

  Mordecai Richler

  Doctors, Essence, Problem

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

  Primo Levi

  Later In Life, Perfect, Joy

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Love, Believe, Ideas

  FaceBook post by Lisa Kleypas from Sep 20, 2010

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• Every man has within himself the entire human condition

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Humans, Every Man

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• Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Writing, Stories, Levitation

  "Gabriel Garcia Marquez: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. April 18, 2014.

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• The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Psychics, Feelings, Peculiar

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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• Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

  Jane Yolen

  Important, Helping, Language

  Jane Yolen (1981). “Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood”, Philomel

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• The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.

  Jon Krakauer

  Strong, Blow, Hands

  FaceBook post by Jon Krakauer from Jul 27, 2012

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• There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

  George Santayana

  Book, Hands, Interesting

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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