Human Life Quotes - Page 28

• Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.

  Michael Chabon

  Quality, Done, Sacred

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• Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe

  Gary Snyder

  Rushing, Style, Today

  Gary Snyder (1969). “Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries”, p.126, New Directions Publishing

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• As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

  Anne Lamott

  Christian, Children, Fighting

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.81, Penguin

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• in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

  Hannah Arendt

  Character, Men, Self

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• All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

  Philip Pullman

  Struggle, Stupidity, His Dark Materials

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The Amber Spyglass”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Grief, Joy, Bereavement

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “The Brothers Karamazov”, p.442, First Avenue Editions

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• The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

  Tony Kushner

  Spring, Two, People

  Tony Kushner (1995). “Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, A Play, Two Poems and a Prayer”, p.40, Theatre Communications Group

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• We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Rocks, Circles

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• But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age: I bless the sun's rising each day and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories, dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life--and over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Memories, Moving, Blessed

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• What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know the answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.

  Albert Einstein

  Religious, Mean, Men

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.333, Princeton University Press

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• I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object...Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves "pro-life".

  Ayn Rand

  Running, Ambition, Pro Life

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.27, Penguin

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• There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Stars, Order, Feelings

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.97, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable

  Harry S. Truman

  Achievement, World, Our Society

  United States. President (1945-1953 : Truman), Harry S. Truman (1961). “Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1945-53”

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• On the Bigotry of Culture: : it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Mean, Essence, Culture

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• I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

  Jonathan Littell

  Believe, Air, Drink

  Jonathan Littell (2009). “The Kindly Ones: A Novel”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.

  Bertrand Russell

  Stars, Real, Law

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.70, Psychology Press

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• It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

  Noam Chomsky

  Personality, Psychology, Might

  Noam Chomsky (1988). “Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures”, p.159, MIT Press

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• We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

  Edward Abbey

  Girl, Boys, Men

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• This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

  Milan Kundera

  Fashion, Reading, May

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• Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Doe, Stories, Littles

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• What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, God, Function

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.28, Anchor

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• We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.

  Jasper Fforde

  Mistake, People, Cost

  "The Eyre Affair". Book by Jasper Fforde, July 19, 2001.

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• To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.

  Hermann Hesse

  Mother, Men, Abortion

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.45, Macmillan

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• A kiss may ruin a human life

  Oscar Wilde

  Life, Kissing, May

  Oscar Wilde (2004). “The Best of Oscar Wilde: Selected Plays and Writings”, p.164, Penguin

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• Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

  Michael Crichton

  Children, Animal, Years

  Michael Crichton (1997). “Michael Crichton's Jurassic World”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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