Human Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one is trying to achieve.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

M. F. K. Fisher

I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future.

Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.

Andrei Sakharov

The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.

Charles W. Chesnutt

It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.

William Cobbett

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Willard van Orman Quine

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.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

Robert Wilson Lynd

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.

George Marshall

We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

Archibald MacLeish

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest…The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the astral form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it.

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

Experience has taught me to believe that, these human beans are the most insidious enemies man, with a tendency to corpulence in advanced life, can possess, though eminently friendly to youth.

William Banting

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

James A. Michener

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind.

Cleveland Amory

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.