Browsing Quotes With Tag: humanity (66)
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The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
Speaker: Mark TwainPosted: 24 Dec 2014 at 9:22 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
Speaker: Mohammed AliPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 10:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Dostoevsky suggested that one sacred memory from childhood was, perhaps, the best education.
I say to you that one plausible, romantic theory about humanity is perhaps the best prize you can take away from a university.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: If This Isn't Nice, What Is?Posted: 27 Jun 2014 at 2:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. If you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.
Speaker: George CarlinSource: 7 Dirty WordsPosted: 12 Jan 2014 at 3:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Speaker: Mark TwainSource: 7 Dirty WordsPosted: 12 Jan 2014 at 3:49 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“People are so goddamn predictable. i should write a book about how to suckerpunch people into caring.” Jibsen
Speaker: Reif LarsenSource: The Selected Works of T.S. SpivetPosted: 18 May 2010 at 7:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life
Speaker: Katherine F. GerouldPosted: 10 Apr 2010 at 7:20 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems
Speaker: Mohandas GandhiPosted: 31 Jan 2010 at 9:49 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.
Speaker: John KnowlesSource: A Separate PeacePosted: 17 Dec 2009 at 4:07 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Why does it give so much comfort to be responsible for someones sleep? We all – don’t we? – want creatures sleeping in our homes while we walk about, turning off lights.
Speaker: Dave EggersSource: How We Are HungryPosted: 26 Nov 2009 at 8:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Speaker: Willa CatherSource: O Pioneers!Posted: 19 Nov 2009 at 9:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
Speaker: Nelson MandelaPosted: 22 Aug 2009 at 6:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Unfortunately, Parlin,” Vivenna said, “people aren’t like animals.”
“I am aware of that,” Parlin said. “Animals make sense.”Speaker: Brandon SandersonSource: WarbreakerPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 1:28 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Yet another piece of the solution dropped into place when my friend Judy said that the problem was trying to stop the jealousy and competitiveness, and that the main thing was not to let it fuel my self-loathing. She said it was nuts for me to try to be happy for this other writer. I cannot tell you how much this helped. I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy of fear that it will always be someone else’s turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.
Speaker: Anne LamottSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 1:15 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights.
Speaker: Martin Luther King, Jr.Posted: 29 Jul 2009 at 12:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
So many quests, all these different worlds… Can we all be so similar yet live in such disparate worlds? Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:10 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise.
To be sure, there are those who will argue that mankind aspires to meaning beyond mere impulses. But I would counter that while this is certainly true (otherwise, what am I to do with literature?), it is also utterly false: meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means – understanding – to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning abd beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at our disposal.Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:12 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! it carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the ever, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring… We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 8:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, carving from time an emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind’s ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 25 Jun 2009 at 7:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when the two are compared.
Speaker: James Matthew BarriePosted: 20 Mar 2009 at 11:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!