Browsing Quotes With Tag: humanity (66)
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“I caused men no longer to foresee their death.
…I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.
…And helping humans I found trouble for myself,
Yet I did not expect such punishment as this.” PrometheusSpeaker: AeschylusPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
[Prometheus] believed in, and wanted to help, the human race as it is, full of both noble achievement and pitiable squalor, honoring both goodness and wickedness; a race where virtue, if rare, is at least costly.
Speaker: Philip VellacottPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes of every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit.
Speaker: Elbert HubbardPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.
Speaker: SantayanaPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:17 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I am going to meet people today who talk too much – people who are selfish, egotistical, and ungrateful. But I won’t be surprised or disturbed, for I couldn’t imagine a world without such people.
Speaker: Marcus AureliusPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:12 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Speaker: Henry David ThoreauPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:01 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts – because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.
“...the goodness is in the laughing. I grok it as a bravery… and a sharing… against pain and sorrow and defeat.”Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 11:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Man is the animal who laughs,” Jubal answered. … “Man born of woman and born to trouble… and some day you will grok its fullness and laugh – because man is the animal that laughs at himself.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity… and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:49 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“So I will tell you something. Listen. Listen closely.
Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth,
Our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.
So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees,
He thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.
But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times,
Bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.
Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth,
Turn as the days turn…
As the father of men and gods makes each day dawn.” AmphinomusSpeaker: HomerPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But no one attacked me. A couple of people wished me a happy New Year, but that was about all. There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being afraid.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are rejected at the pleasure of Another!
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it [love] is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“If you wait long enough,” he said, “people will surprise and impress you.”
…Jon warned me that sometimes this took great patience – even years.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:44 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I gave the boy back into Parvati’s arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai’s favorite phrases. Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the woman.
You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:28 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!