Human Life Quotes - Page 27

• Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

  A. N. Wilson

  Liars, Believe, Angel

  A. N. Wilson (1990). “Incline Our Hearts”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't believe the fertilised egg can be equated with the sort of human life that you and I represent, or our children represent.

  Robert Winston

  Children, Believe, Eggs

  "Epiphanies: Lord Robert Winston". "The Spirit of Things" with Rachael Kohn, www.abc.net.au. June 4, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Sometimes, Conflict, Absence

  The CNN Interview, www.cnn.com. November 20, 2007.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.

  Julian Baggini

  Believe, People, Life Is

  "Why all deaths are not equal" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Beautiful, Wish, Together

  Gabrielle Zevin (2016). “Elsewhere”, p.148, Bloomsbury Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Learning To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Believe, Enough, Labor

  7 Copy quote

• There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

  John Stuart Mill

  Practice, Atheism, Example

  John Stuart Mill (1962). “Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Purpose, Lilies, Enough

  FaceBook post by Sue Monk Kidd from Feb 12, 2014

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Life Is, Reason, Humans

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1915). “War & Peace: The French at Moscow”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Squares, Roots

  24 Copy quote

• I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hate, Essentials, Vastness

  Bertrand Russell (1995). “My Philosophical Development”, p.193, Psychology Press

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

  Pat Conroy

  Laughter, Fate, Law

  Pat Conroy (2012). “Beach Music”, p.115, Random House

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• You cannot measure the loss of a human life. It's all the things a person was, all their dreams, all the people who loved them, all they hoped to be and could give back to the world.

  Joan Bauer

  Dream, Loss, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Children, Ignorance, Political

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (1962). “Brutus”, Loeb Classical Library

  146 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

  Ayn Rand

  Fate, Thinking, Suffering

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.580, Hamilton Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

  Diane Setterfield

  Winter, Thinking, Important

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

  Virginia Woolf

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  Virginia Woolf (1932). “A Letter to a Young Poet”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  George Eliot

  Real, Lying, Heart

  Middlemarch bk. 2, ch. 20 (1871 - 1872)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.

  John Stuart Mill

  Individuality, Earth, Salt

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.200, Hackett Publishing

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.

  Anne Rice

  Real, Men, Evil

  Anne Rice (1977). “Interview with the Vampire: A Novel”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

  Martin Amis

  Light, Years, Inches

  9 Copy quote

• According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Pain, Suffering, Purpose

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.188, A&C Black

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

  Salman Rushdie

  Moving, Castles, Tumbling

  Salman Rushdie (2000). “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel”, p.543, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?

  Karl Marx

  Money, Men, Ties

  Karl Marx, Martin Milligan (1974). “Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844”

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

  P. D. James

  Order, Ideas, Guilt

  Interview With Jennifer Reese, www.salon.com. February 26, 1998.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source