Becoming Human Quotes

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Doug moved over to the table and sat next to Corey. "Are you all right?..
I think I know what's wrong with you."
Corey perked up. "What? What's wrong with me?"
Doug leaned in, grinning. "You're becoming human."
"Fuck off!"
Doug leaned back in his chair. "It was bound to happen eventually."
"I don't like it. I used to be bulletproof."
"Even superheroes get older. ~ Darien Cox

Did he bleed?
Well, of course. He took on a human form. That always makes them vulnerable, becoming human. ~ Eliza Victoria

Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together. ~ Herbert Mason

in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This ~ Bruce Chatwin

Each human must invent human love, a chance that will be given to you in becoming human. And for all the atrocity they have done and will do, it is still through human love, and no other, that appetite, desire, and pleasure themselves become the source of ethics, which knowledge makes inseparable from love ~ Patricia Storace

We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death. ~ Johann Baptist Metz

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. ~ James Baldwin

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order. ~ John Shelby Spong

Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It's okay to feel all of the stuff you're feeling. You're just becoming human again. You're not doing life wrong; you're doing it right. If there's any secret you're missing, it's that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that's what they're for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes. ~ Glennon Doyle

In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition. ~ William A. Dembski

[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world. ~ Daniel Quinn

[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance
to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. ~ Judith Butler

I had a foretaste of another, larger kind of knowledge: one I believe human beings will be able to access in ever larger numbers in the future. But conveying that knowledge now is rather like a chimpanzee, becoming human for a single day to experience all of the wonders of human knowledge, and then returning to one's chimp friends and trying to tell them what it was like knowing several different Romance languages, the calculus, and the immense scale of the universe. ~ Eben Alexander

We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music. ~ Satish Kumar

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. ~ William Ellery Channing

The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life, not hesitating to kill a great many of them and justifying this on the grounds that they are being the objects of terrorism, which is true. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars. ~ Tom Sweterlitsch

I will be guided by the Christian ethic and an awareness that human action is by nature transient. ~ Horst Koehler

People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast. ~ Sherwood Anderson

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it. ~ Dennis Prager

Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the "holy" books. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head
in my memory, in my thoughts
was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes, shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said. ~ Claire Messud

How to love is the real question. We all know to love and to keep loving more, but man's confusion comes from the differing opinions on how to love. The Church will always be accused of not loving enough by human standards - which should be its motivation to love more - however that is, in many cases, because its focus is and should also be to love on levels of eternal significance. This is the level of love that will inevitably go unnoticed by those who do not believe in eternity. ~ Criss Jami

I've always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I'm most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It's why we seek the limelight - so we're not alone, were adored. We're loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being alone drives my life. ~ Jennifer Lopez

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them ~ Elie Wiesel

I didn't swear an oath of secrecy, and I figure you've seen enough spooky shit the last few days that knowing about me is the least of your problems. Besides, I dare you to tell anyone I'm really a wolf pretending to be human. I double dog dare you. That, my friend, will get you locked inside a rubber room. (Vane) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

But I'm not even human, waking on this soil like a dead life. ~ Yogesh Chandra

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Tony stood up and began pacing the room. "Jack," he
confessed, "my life that I defined as a success is actually a total
shambles, and yet you're suggesting that underneath it all, there
is an unimaginable beauty? Are you telling me that I matter?
That even though I am this ugly, ordinary-looking root, that I was
designed and intended to express a unique and extraordinary
flower? That's what you are telling me… right?"
Jack nodded, again removing his pipe for a puff.
"And I assume," Tony continued, "this is true about every
human being, each person born - "
"Conceived!" interrupted Jack.
"Each person 'conceived' on the planet, each one living in
life-before, each one is a root in which a flower is waiting?
Right?"
Again Jack nodded ~ William Paul Young

Sometimes you do everything you can to destroy yourself, but surprisingly you get out of this situation by becoming even stronger! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did steam-powered ships cross the Atlantic. ~ David McCullough

We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street. ~ Alvar Aalto

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. ~ Aldous Huxley

At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality - law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In a proper Islamic University, fard 'ain knowledge which represents the permanent intellectual and spiritual needs of the human soul
should form the core curriculum, and should be made obligatory to all students. Fard kifayah knowledge
reflecting societal needs and global trends
is not obligatory to all, but must be mastered by and adequate number of Muslims to ensure the proper development of the Community and to safeguard its proper place in world affairs. The fard 'ain knowledge shall include knowledge of the traditional Islamic sciences such as the Arabic language, metaphysics, the Qur'an and Hadith, ethics, the shari'ah sciences, and the history of Islam. Consonant with our position that these fard 'ain sciences are not static but dynamic, they should be continuously studied, analyzed, and applied in relation to the fard kifayah sciences; i.e. the fields of their specialization. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

I am out of step with present conditions. When the game is no longer played your way, it is only human to say the new approach is all wrong, bound to lead to trouble, and so on. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand ( although I find it difficult to apply ) even though it may mean foregoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which possibly could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital. ~ Warren Buffett

My hair was mousy brown, parted in the center, straight and not particularly thick. Human hair, doing what human hair does: growing on my head. ~ Gail Honeyman

And I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. ~ W.G. Sebald

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most ... No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice ... but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different ... Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips". ~ Annie Dillard

Despite the modern dogma to the effect that women were a subject sex until the nineteenth century 'emancipated' them from history, women in history had demonstrated strong wills and purposes, had made assertions, and had directed or influenced all human destiny, including their own, since human life began. ~ Mary Ritter Beard

If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

You - a sight for sore eyes,
a touch of brush on canvas,
an enclave on my wicked heart,
a ludicrous perfect composition
of selected words, of an unknown poet,
such perfection,
uniquely spread in a human being.

(Excerpted from The runner, chapter Pain) ~ Claudia Pavel

We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy ... It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong. ~ Robert James Brown

I think that people are going to find more interest in the human condition, especially with them being weaned on so much reality television. They want character driven stuff along with real violence. Cage fighting is very popular with the kids right now. They see and know what one punch can do to someone's face. You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore. ~ Dolph Lundgren

According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile
just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can ... bliss. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Destroy such shining altars that spread bigotry - demolish such glorious churches and temples that proclaim divine supremacy - burn such glistening crucifixes, scriptures and idols that are used to preach weakness and segregation - obliterate every single trace of orthodoxy from the face of this planet, not with violence, but with awareness - and work - work to uplift the downtrodden - work to elevate the impoverished - work to raise those abandoned by fortune and opportunity - only then you shall have the rightful place under the sun as a holy human being. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do
perfectly well. ~ Colin Wilson

...when President Clinton, on the anniversary of his election, spoke in the church in Tennessee where Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered his last sermon. Inspired by the place and the occasion, he made one of the most eloquent speeches of his presidency. What would King have said, he asked, had he lived to see this day?

"He would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. This is not what I came here to do.

I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon; not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work, but not have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for."

After describing what his administration was doing to curb drugs and violence, the President concluded that the government alone could not do the job. The problem was caused by "the breakdown of the family, the community and the disappearance of jobs," and unless we "reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul and the truth of human nature, none of the ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

With my veil I put my faith on display - rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don't see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator.
You see, as a Muslim woman, I've been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don't answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

In the smart home of the future, there should be a robot designed to talk to you. With enough display technology, connectivity, and voice recognition, this human-interface robot or head-of-household robot will serve as a portal to the digital domain. It becomes your interface to your robot-enabled home. ~ Colin Angle

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it's a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes." (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that "In people's day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers' battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one's children's stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire." (Grossman, p. 110) ~ Vasily Grossman

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

This doctrine of Christ and of the apostles, from which the true faith of the primitive church was received, the apostles at first delivered orally, without writing, but later, not by any human counsel but by the will of God, they handed it on in the Scriptures. ~ Martin Chemnitz

In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart. ~ E.B. White

[The Internet] affects democracy ... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy. ~ Lawrence Lessig

Consider the clinicaltrials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.5 Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinicaltrials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive - that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk - the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. ~ Marcia Angell

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others. ~ Elizabeth Janeway

The simple answer is that I have changed my techniques in order to avoid the relentless sameness of my material, but I have probably only found new costumes, not new creatures entirely. In the past, if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn't just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do. Simple things, even entirely undramatic ones, could not occur unless I created them from whole cloth. I was superstitious about taking anything for granted, but it also locked me into a kind of fanatical object fondling that could, on a bad day, preclude any exploration of the human (even though the process of trying to remake the world on the page is fairly, pathetically, human). This set of interests kept me away from what is usually called narrative. It wasn't some ideological position, or an artistic stance, it was just one set of obsessions winning out over another. On the other hand, I think that I have always tried to create feeling, and then to pulse it into the reader with language. It's very difficult to figure out how to do this. Storytelling is one way - conventional n ~ Ben Marcus

In fact, I didn't really want to have final words at all, unless they involved something like, "At last, I have transcended beyond the boundaries of my frail human existence. ~ Andrew Rowe