Human Acts Quotes

Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. ~ Joshua Foer

So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one might interpret 'fruit' to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one's inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character. ~ Gurcharan Das

The buying of a self-help book is the most desperate of all human acts. It means you've lost your mind completely: You've entrusted your mental health to a self-aggrandizing twit with a psychology degree and a yen for a yacht. ~ Cynthia Heimel

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is it not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness? ~ Han Kang, Human Acts

Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is. ~ Justin Cronin

So why bother investing in one's memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. ~ Joshua Foer

The end toward which all human acts are directed is happiness. ~ Aristotle.

It's the soldiers, not him, that your death should have weighed on, so why did he grow so old before his time, so much quicker than all his friends? ~ Han Kang, Human Acts

A great paradox which should God make us understand, we will weep, laugh, wonder and ponder is the paradox of human ignorance ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It is possible to think of fragrance existing before a flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy.
Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in possession of her full mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago - long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth - she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for a repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn, she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains.
What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient. ~ Nadeem Aslam

Reverential human acts of submission and homage before the divine Sovereign, in response to his gracious revelation of himself, and in accordance with his will. ~ Dan Block

March 24, 2018

How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?
Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame? ~ Han Kang, Human Acts

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember ... No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory ... Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estranged ... memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human. ~ Joshua Foer

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable? ~ Han Kang

We won't get our rituals back if we don't show up. Show up first, and the ritual will come. Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother's hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn't dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or in a ring. Don't be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss. ~ Caitlin Doughty

It is through the multitudinous mass of living human hearts, of human acts and words of love and truth, that the Christ of the first century has become the Christ of the nineteenth. ~ Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

Every practical science is concerned with human operations; as moral science is concerned with human acts, and architecture with buildings. But sacred doctrine is chiefly concerned with God, whose handiwork is especially man. Therefore it is not a practical but a speculative science. ~ Thomas Aquinas

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil. ~ Richard Flanagan

One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there. ~ Han Kang

Here I am sitting in the back of a cab with Catherine Zeta-Jones who is telling me Michael Douglas has fond memories of me - it just makes me feel good as a human being. ~ John Schneider

We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy. ~ Anthony Lewis

For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry
technical as well as human
that went into its creation. ~ Howard Schultz

All human action is expressive; a gesture is an intentionally expressive action. All art is expressive - of its author and of the situation in which he works - but some art is intended to move us through visual gestures that transmit, and perhaps give release to, emotions and emotionally charged messages. Such art is expressionist. ~ Norbert Lynton

Living is a creative and active process of diligent learning that entails industrious human action, attentive awareness, and thoughtful reflection. Learning is one facet of human beings innate capacity that can provide a sense of worthiness to human life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes. ~ James Altucher

I think what makes people fascinating is conflict, it's drama, it's the human condition. Nobody wants to watch perfection. ~ Nicolas Cage

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature! ~ Thomas Mann

I don't even like old cars. I mean, they don't even interest me at all. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human ~ J.D. Salinger

I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species. ~ John Hughes

Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life - an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice? ~ Lisa Wingate

We may acknowledge, intellectually, our body's reliance upon those plants and animals that we consume as nourishment, yet the civilized mind still feels itself somehow separate, autonomous, independent of the body and of bodily nature in general. Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world… This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate. ~ David Abram

Be a human angel! With love, generosity and kindness, let us lighten the burden of suffering from humanity. ~ Debasish Mridha

Our mathematics is the symbolic counterpart of the universe we perceive, and its power has been continuously enhanced by human exploration. ~ Mario Livio

Primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood. ~ Dan Simmons

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahmanistic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods, nothing but pain and persecution, have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder. Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon the earth. ~ Emma Goldman

The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a tall, soft-eyed girl. "Love is the true condition of human life."
Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev's right," he said. "Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race. ~ Harlan Ellison

How simple life is. It's as simple as this: you're hungry and you eat, you're full and you shit. Between eating and shitting, that's where human life is found. - (Houseboy + Maid, in Tales from Djakarta) ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle. ~ Haruki Murakami

Souls up here will decide whether they want to incarnate into a human earthly life or whether they want to experience an existence on another galaxy or star system somewhere else. ~ Anthea Wynn

The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do. ~ Isabel Allende

America's foreign policy supports freedom, democracy, and human dignity for all mankind, and we make no apologies for it. The opportunity society that we want for ourselves we also want for others, not because we're imposing our system on others but because those opportunities belong to all people as God-given birthrights and because by promoting democracy and economic opportunity we make peace more secure. ~ Ronald Reagan

We are pouring huge amounts of energy into the biological effort to understand where life came from, how it arose on planet Earth, because it matters to us; it is, perhaps our deepest question. Really, it boils down to this: Are we special? The best summation has been attributed to the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not," he said. "In either case the idea is quite staggering." Clarke is right. If we are alone, that's extraordinary. If we are not , that's even better. Were we to discover that we are one of many life-forms on a planet that is one of many inhabited worlds, we would have a new perspective on being human - on being alive, even. And if we discover that some of that life beyond Earth is intelligent, a whole new vista of possible human experience opens up before us. ~ Michael Brooks

Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom ~ Simone De Beauvoir

God desires his people to be abounding in love and good works. To be people of integrity and honor. People who reflect his character. But we are human - sinful people capable of evil deeds. ~ Karen Witemeyer

Psychologically speaking, far from being worthless, a system is indeed necessary, for any kind of human endeavor. A structure aids in the mind's endeavor of learning. But the moment the mind becomes dependent on the system and starts trusting the system more than the internal faculties of the mind, the very element of education fades away from the system. ~ Abhijit Naskar

How is it that human anatomy evolved so
that something as stupid-looking as a repetitive back-and-forth movement can generate the peak of physical ecstasy? ~ Daria Snadowsky

The best... measure of innovation is change in human behavior. ~ Stuart Butterfield

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence - these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument. ~ Roger Lundin

Banning human cloning reflects our humanity. It is the right thing to do. Creating a child through this new method calls into question our most fundamental beliefs. It has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society. At its worst, it could lead to misguided and malevolent attempts to select certain traits, even to create certain kind of children
to make our children objects rather than cherished individuals. ~ William J. Clinton

गु� ��मा, गु� �व�णु, गु� देवो महे�वरःl
गु��सा�ाथ परम ��मा त�मै�ी गुरावेनामः॥
Guru the darkness dispeller, Guru Brahma the Creator be,
Guru Vishnu the Preserver; Guru Shiv the Transformer be,
Guru, the Supreme Being in human form – our savour be,
My salutations, awe, gratitude to that Divine Teacher be.
- 1 - ~ Munindra Misra

I had to decide who I was, Night or Day, Human or Vampire. ~ P.A. Ross

Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. ~ William James

Girls love kissing. Our lips replicate the lips we discreetly hide. We redden lips to show the health and allure of our labia, the welcoming of your tongue in our mouth a foretaste of lips moistened and blood-gorged by desire. Some kisses last forever in our minds, some kisses are best forgotten. Every kiss is unique and kissing lips is uniquely human. ~ Chloe Thurlow

When I touch that flower, I am not merely touching that flower. I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands, yes, millions of years to come. ~ George Washington Carver

Finally, someone had seen him.
And what had he done? Let her get away. Undermined by his disgusting human anatomy. It had just been made excruciatingly clear to him that the human male brain and the human male c*ck couldn't both sustain sufficient amounts of blood to function at the same time. It was one or the other, and the human male apparently didn't get to choose which one. As a Tuatha Dé, he would have been in complete control of his lust. Desirous yet coolheaded, perhaps even a touch bored (it wasn't as if he could do something he hadn't done before; given a few thousand years, a Tuatha Dé got around to trying everything).
But as a human male, lust was far more intense, and his body was apparently slave to it. A simple hard-on could turn him into a bloody Neanderthal. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Though Christians are accused of holding bigoted and inhumane beliefs about sexuality, this is not true. Our view of sexuality is rooted not in fear or self-righteous prudery. It is rooted in our high view of human dignity as God's image-bearers. That's why we do not believe that sexuality defines humanity, nor do we believe humanity defines sexuality. Being human, and thus made in the likeness of God, is so noble a thing that God alone reserves the right to confer the definition of our true personhood. We do not say with Lady Gaga, "I'm beautiful in my way." We say, "I am beautiful in God's way." To the degree that we abandon God's way, we abandon our beauty. ~ Jon Bloom

Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race ... Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports - one planet indivisible, with clean air, ... soil and water; with liberty, justice and peace for all. ~ William Sloane Coffin

It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code. ~ Jane Addams