Human Life Quotes - Page 12

• Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

  Ouida

  Angel, Passion, Rose

  Ouida (1896). “Views and Opinions”

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• Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hate, Three, Plies

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “Between the Acts”, p.64, Virginia Woolf

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• How can we be such fools as to go on senselessly taking human life in this way? Why the women in every nation do not rise up and refuse to bring children into a world of this kind is beyond my understanding.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Children, Understanding, Goes On

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• As in walking it is your great care not to run your foot upon a nail, or to tread awry, and strain your leg; so let it be in all the affairs of human life, not to hurt your mind or offend your judgment. And this rule, if observed carefully in all your deportment, will be a mighty security to you in your undertakings.

  Epictetus

  Running, Hurt, Feet

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• The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Daughter, Children, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)”, p.1054, Delphi Classics

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• The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Appreciation, Intellectual, Criticism

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• One can argue that in the context of history a few years do not matter. But we live in an age in which every moment counts heavily and the price of delay is human lives.

  Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

  Years, Age, Delay

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• Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

  Rebecca West

  Blow, Destiny, Names

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.545, Open Road Media

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• Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.

  Rebecca West

  Music, Tragedy, Sound

  Rebecca West (2010). “Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey”, p.171, Open Road Media

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• Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Disappointment, Events, Deities

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.42

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• We don't consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Mean, Men, Creative

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• I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Thinking, Magic

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• Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life.

  Isaac Watts

  Men, Mind, Lovely

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• Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Passion, Emotional, Burning

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher “Vermont Tradition: The Biography of an Outlook on Life”

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• Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Men, Firsts, Life Is

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.196, Hackett Publishing

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• How short is human life! the very breath
  Which frames my words accelerates my death.

  Hannah More

  Death, Humans, Breaths

  Hannah More (1827). “Sacred Drams: The Search After Happiness, A. Other Poems”, p.122

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• But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Fighting, People

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.291, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Fate, Political, Politics

  Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue (2008). “Collected stories and other writings”

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• If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.

  Stephen Hawking

  Long, Would Be, Generations

  "Return of the time lord". Interview With Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2005.

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• Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict ... Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life.

  Karen Horney

  Conflict, Let Me, Neurotic

  Karen Horney (2013). “Our Inner Conflicts: A CONSTRUCTIVE THEORY OF NEUROSIS”, p.23, Routledge

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• The supreme purpose and goal for human life... is to cultivate love.

  Ramakrishna

  Goal, Purpose, Life Is

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• Mostly actors are progressive because we are accustomed to all the nuances of human life, whereas dictators just try to flatten it all out. So we usually try to stand up to dictators like, well, we won't mention names.

  Jane Fonda

  Names, Trying, Actors

  Interview with Lord Puttnam, www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2005.

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• The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.

  Joseph Joubert

  Life, Age, Innocence

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven.

  Isaac Barrow

  Men, Heaven, Noble

  Isaac Barrow (1830). “The Works of Dr. Isaac Barrow”, p.369

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• Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

  Camille Paglia

  Rose, Elements, Flight

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.26, Canongate Books

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