Humans Quotes - Page 11

• What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

  Albert Camus

  Lying, Mean, Two

  "The Myth of Sisyphus". Book by Albert Camus, 1942.

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• Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

  Bruno Schulz

  Animal, Men, Example

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Book, Heart, Empty

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• I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.

  John Stuart Mill

  Perfect, Mind, Wicked

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “John Stuart Mill: Life, Life Lessons & Achievements: Childhood and Early Education, Moral Influences in Early Youth, Youthful Propagandism, Completion of the "System of Logic", Publication of the "Principles of Political Economy", Parliamentary Life”, p.25, Madison & Adams

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• To Thetis, Long overdue, I know, but every often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle. That is a human truth, I think. Even Peleus knew that. -Seth

  Richelle Mead

  Struggle, Thinking, Long

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• Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.

  Steven Pinker

  Dream, Selfish, Book

  "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

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• Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Dad, Stupid, Simple

  Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.283, Hachette UK

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• I feel like a goddess, jailed in her Olympus. Little wonder how the gods toyed with humans. Toyed with women, to watch them squirm, pollinate the seeds of despair; toyed with men, to satiate their Seven Deadly Sins.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Men, Despair, Olympus

  Ellen Hopkins (2013). “Glass”, p.476, Simon and Schuster

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• She felt so human that he could barely carry on a conversation.

  L.A. Weatherly

  Conversation, Felt

  L.A. Weatherly (2010). “Angel: The Angel Trilogy”, p.84, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.

  Agatha Christie

  Elephants, Remember, Forget

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• A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

  Nick Harkaway

  Pie, Hot, Ephemeral

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• Ah, afflicted one, your disabilities were meant to unite with God's enablings, your weakness to mate His power. God's grace is at hand -sufficent-- and at its best when human weakness is most profound. Appropriate it and learn that those who wait on God are stronger in their weakness than the sons of men in their stoutest health and vigor.

  F.B. Meyer

  Son, Men, Hands

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• Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Army, Order

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• I like to be direct." "Okay," I said. "But I warn you, I like to be evasive, inserutable and generally send mixed messages." "I doubt it." "Human interaction is not my strong point," I told him.

  E. Lockhart

  Strong, Doubt, Messages

  "Real Live Boyfriends: Yes, Boyfriends, Plural, if my Life weren't Complicated, I wouldn't be Ruby Oliver". Book by E. Lockhart, 2010.

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• Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Love Is, Bridges

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• Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but rather by what one owns.

  Jimmy Carter

  Identity, Doe, Malaise

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• So do all animals react that way to you? I know you said rats steer clear." "Most do. They see a human, but they smell someting else. It confuses them. Canines are the worst, though." He paused. "No, cats are the worst. I really don't like cats." I laughed.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Cat, Animal, Smell

  Kelley Armstrong (2009). “The Awakening”, p.200, Penguin Group

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• Yet, isn't it strange, isn't it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as 'facts.' Yes, I know that in this case one 'fact' was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a 'fact,' and act on it as if it were true.

  Aidan Chambers

  Clever, Two, Mind

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• But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

  Alice Sebold

  Falling In Love, Taken, Dark

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• That human, he's a lesser waiting to happen, in my opinion--nothing less, nothing more

  J.R. Ward

  Waiting, Opinion, Happens

  J.R. Ward (2011). “Lover Unleashed: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood”, p.256, Penguin

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• Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.

  Clive Barker

  Animal, People, Wonderful

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• The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

  Victor Hugo

  Race, Law, Hatred

  Victor Hugo (2000). “Les Mis??rables”, p.82, Modern Library

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• My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.

  Walter Kirn

  Dream, New York, Book

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• It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.

  Greg Graffin

  Children, Motivation, Ideas

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• Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

  Hamza Yusuf

  Love, Book, Blessing

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