Human Life Quotes - Page 13

• I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Hate, War, Play

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• though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

  Edith Hamilton

  Life Changing, Book, Lessons

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.

  Ntozake Shange

  Emotional, Ideas, Average

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• However constant the visitations of sickness and bereavement, the fall of the year is most thickly strewn with the fall of human life. Everywhere the spirit of some sad power seems to direct the time; it hides from us the blue heavens, it makes the green wave turbid; it walks through the fields, and lays the damp ungathered harvest low; it cries out in the night wind and the shrill hail; it steals the summer bloom from the infant cheek; it makes old age shiver to the heart; it goes to the churchyard, and chooses many a grave.

  James Martineau

  Summer, Fall, Heart

  James Martineau (1858). “Endeavors after the Christian life: discourses”, p.227

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• In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

  Helen McCloy

  Heart, Cities, Humanity

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• Of earth's goods, the best is a good wife; a bad, the bitterest curse of human life.

  Simonides of Ceos

  Wife, Earth, Curse

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• We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part ... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! ... We pay the first cost on all human life.

  Olive Schreiner

  War, Gun, Men

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• Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?

  Kathleen Raine

  Beautiful, Art, Understanding

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• All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears.

  Gerald Massey

  Tears, Hue, Radiance

  Gerald Massey (1889). “My Lyrical Life: Poems Old and New”

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• Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Men, Remembrance, Desire

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• There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a traveling from grave to grave.

  Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

  Ignorance, Two, Goal

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• Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Effort, Creative

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• Despite the modern dogma to the effect that women were a subject sex until the nineteenth century 'emancipated' them from history, women in history had demonstrated strong wills and purposes, had made assertions, and had directed or influenced all human destiny, including their own, since human life began.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Strong, Sex, Women

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• The shadow of human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Hope, Shadow, Golden

  George Stillman Hillard (1853). “Six Months in Italy”, p.221

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• Menaced by collectivist trends, we must seek revival of our strength in the spiritual foundations which are the bedrock of our republic. Democracy is the outgrowth of the religious conviction of the sacredness of every human life. On the religious side, its highest embodiment is the Bible; on the political side, the Constitution.

  Herbert Hoover

  Spiritual, Religious, Political

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• Human life has not a surer friend, nor oftentimes a greater enemy, than hope. It is the miserable man's god, which in the hardest gripe of calamity never fails to yield to him beams of comfort. It is the presumptuous man's devil, which leads him a while in a smooth way, and then suddenly breaks his neck.

  Owen Feltham

  Hope, Men, Yield

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• [On writing biography:] ... every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so profound, that any attempt to present it as a unified, consistent whole, to enclose it within a rigid frame, inevitably tempts one to cheat or to falsify.

  Iris Origo

  Writing, Simple, Profound

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• psychological growth is the great gift and inexorable fact of human life.

  Jean Baker Miller

  Psychology, Growth, Facts

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• We have an arsenal of ideas about land use possibly as dangerous to human life on the planet as the use of nuclear arms.

  Janet Kauffman

  Land, Ideas, Nuclear

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• I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence,' because I don't believe that I am non-violent. ... Right now, I would love to kill George Bush. I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die, the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life.

  Betty Williams

  Life, Death, Children

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• Surely no man can reflect, without wonder upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life.

  Sir Fulke Greville

  Mean, Men, Doors

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• There is no other closeness in human life like the closeness between a mother and her baby - chronologically, physically, and spiritually they are just a few heartbeats away from being the same person.

  Susan Cheever

  Mother, Baby, Heartbeat

  Susan Cheever (1995). “A Woman's Life: The Story of an Ordinary American and Her Extraordinary Generation”, Quill

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• The difference between men and women is inalienable. It is not a political fact, subject to cultural definition and redefinition, but a physical verity. We do truthfully experience our lives differently because our bodies are different. It is in what we do with our experience that we are the same. We feel, absorb and examine with the same intensity, and intense experience honestly examined informs the art of both sexes equally. ... The power of imagination illuminates all human lives in common.

  Anne Truitt

  Art, Sex, Men

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• Saving lives is not a top priority in the halls of power. Being compassionate and concerned about human life can cause a man to lose his job. It can cause a woman not to get the job to begin with.

  Myriam Miedzian

  Jobs, Kindness, Men

  Myriam Miedzian (2002). “Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence”, p.28, Lantern Books

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