Human Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

M. F. K. Fisher

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.

Ellsworth Huntington

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Herbert A. Simon

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. It's self centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity.

One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.

Anna Julia Cooper

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold.

Zelda Fitzgerald

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Elizabeth Janeway

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balance-wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.