Human Despair Quotes

You must think I don't know what's keeping you up at night. You must think we're so different. But I know. Everyone knows despair. Isn't that why people jump off bridges or drown themselves? Anything, really, to escape being human. ~ V.J. Campilan

You start to feel panic, because you realise that human beings are possessed by the idea that they must fill the world with objects and ideas that will outlive them, and you suddenly glimpse the fires that burn below human despair. ~ Greg Baxter

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair. ~ Antonin Artaud

It's that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. ~ David Foster Wallace

Eph 4:9 The fact that he ascended confirms his victorious descent into the deepest pits of human despair. [In John 3:13: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, even the son of man." All mankind originates from above; we are anouthen, from above. ~ Francois Du Toit

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. ~ Ben Ehrenreich

Not a tie hold me to human society at this moment - not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are - none that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Tails from My Puppyhood or, What They Don't Teach You at Obedience School
The tail that wags the dog to bliss
Must put his mouth before his heart.
The simple rule of paw is this:
Show your master he's smart.

The dog intent on happiness
Knows it pays to learn the tricks
Of when to sit and when to piss
And how to accept his master's kiss.

I know the human breath is foul,
But you must let him pet your head.
The dog that turns away its jowls
Will keep his pride but won't be fed.

When he throws you food upon the floor,
Swallow it with a smile.
Smack your lips and beg for more:
Show the bum your style.

When you fetch your master's stick
Drop it gently to his feet.
If you whine, pretend you're sick;
He'll then fetch you more to eat.

I know it's tough to be a hound
And forsake all that you hold dear.
But remember, when he's not around
You can always piss right on his chair. ~ Beryl Dov

The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being. ~ George William Curtis

Human beings fear difference," Lilith had told him once. "Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior." And she had put her hand on his hair. "When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference." Akin ~ Octavia E. Butler

It's SpongeBob, Eleanor," he said, speaking very slowly and clearly as though I were some sort of idiot. "SpongeBob SquarePants?" A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable! For my entire life, people have said that I'm strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize that I'm actually relatively normal. ~ Gail Honeyman

I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that he would support the death penalty only when the infallibility of human judgment had been demonstrated. ~ Paul Jacob

William's eyes glowed like two amber coals. She met his gaze and flinched. No emotion reflected in the amber, only intelligence, cruel in a way the eyes of a hunting Mire cat were cruel. She saw no worry, no softness, no thoughts at all, only waiting. He seemed barely human now, not a man but some feral thing, knitted of darkness and biding his time for an opportunity to pounce. ~ Ilona Andrews

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool. ~ Albert Camus

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Each person has a specific mission in the world, but all human beings serve like cells in a single body, working together in the realization of a common goal. ~ Kabbalah Centre

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS works as a metaphor for our central human experience: we have no way to objectively know about anything, no way to move forward with certainty, and yet move forward we must. We stumble through life, trying to find our own way, not knowing whom to listen to, whom to trust, whom to suspect, what to believe. But in that process we discover our most authentic selves. ~ Norman Buckley

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. ~ Ted Chiang

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. ~ E. M. Forster

Writers choose to drink because of their inability to cope with the daily hassles of being part of a society. Why shouldn't they? Every day an intelligent human being is plagued with bills, horrifying news stories and general idiocy that slowly grinds away at their psyche, breaking off pieces of it that may never fit again. ~ Thor Benson

A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it. ~ Mark Twain

There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity. ~ Nenia Campbell

Men will always seek gods in whose name they may perform great deeds or commit unspeakable atrocities, even when those gods are not gods but "tribal honor" or "genetic imperatives" or "social ideals" or "human
destiny" or "liberal democracy." Then again, men also kill on account of money, land, love, pride, hatred, envy, or ambition. They kill out of conviction or out of lack of conviction. Harris ~ David Bentley Hart

The West should be even more vocal in insisting that the Russians respect human rights. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

History has shown that in every age and in every field of human knowledge, many of the views which almost everyone accepted as true and never bothered to think about further, were in time proven completely wrong. ~ Philip Arthur Fisher

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us. ~ John Powell

The marvelous richness of human experience would lose
something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to
overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if
there were no dark valleys to traverse. ~ Helen Keller

Upton Sinclair said 'it's difficult to get a man to understand something when he's being paid not to understand it' [paraphrase] that's simply a truism of human nature. And part of the problem is us. There is to some degree, unaccountable power in the United States because America has one of the lowest voter participation rates among the western democracies. For whatever reason, people have become apathetic, uninformed and cynical. They don't participate because they think there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. And what's going to rush into the vacuum? It's going to be power, money and influence centers who would benefit from everybody just going to sleep." Mike Lofgren, March 15, 2017 on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane ~ Mike Lofgren

Exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the precise measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked kettle (caldron), upon which we beat out tunes fit to make bears dance when our aim is to move the stars to pity. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Most of the complexity of a human neuron is devoted to maintaining its life-support functions, not its information-processing capabilities. Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things. ~ Giambattista Vico

A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then - through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire - has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary 'choice' - as among possibilities that somehow exceed his 'present' actuality - would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be 'capable' of evil - to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it - would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will is his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfec ~ David Bentley Hart

We as Aboriginal people still have to fight to prove that we are straight out plain human beings, the same as everyone else. You know, I grew up, born on a government blanket under a palm tree. I lived under lantana bushes, I've seen more dinner times than I've seen dinners, I've known discrimination, I've known prejudice, I've known all of those things ... but some of that is still with us ... and it's got to be changed ... ~ Neville Bonner

One of the ultimate things a human can learn is kindness for their fellow humans ~ Evan Tanner

The Internet is just a bunch of servers and broadband cables and routers that traffic data around the world. But I think now the Internet is starting to become an entity that society views as a human thing. ~ Adam Ostrow