Human Endeavor Quotes

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor ... It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn. ~ Emma Goldman

One of the great challenges in healthcare technology is that medicine is at once an enormous business and an exquisitely human endeavor; it requires the ruthless efficiency of the modern manufacturing plant and the gentle hand-holding of the parish priest; it is about science, but also about art; it is eminently quantifiable and yet stubbornly not. ~ Robert Wachter

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. ~ Tim Wu

However gemlike mathematical truths may be, research is but a human endeavor. ~ H. David Burton

I saw- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together ... Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ~ Mary Shelley

Religion's greatest "sin" lies in displacing human endeavor, thought, time, resources and efforts from this world, our only world, in order to exalt a highly unlikely, unknowable, unseeable, unprovable and unbelievable pretend afterworld. The only afterlife that ought to concern us is leaving our descendants (along with the other animals and life we share our planet with) a secure and pleasant future. ~ Annie Laurie Gaylor

Neither a pathology nor an index as such of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor. ~ Avital Ronell

Freedom is one of the principal goals of human endeavor, but the best use man can make of his freedom is to place limitations upon it. ~ Edwin Conklin

... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified ... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have. ~ Albert Camus

Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom. ~ Abhijit Naskar

To try to pray is to pray. You can't fail at it. Nobody can ... It's the only human endeavor I can think of where trying is doing. Reaching out is holding on. Joining in is letting go. ~ Rick Hamlin

A refined ability to learn from failure and to grow through losses is necessary to achieve excellence in any human endeavor. ~ Terry Orlick

All things considered, science is the best means of understanding almost everything around us. It works well on the human scale and stands as a stark counter-point to beliefs that by their very nature refute the notion of evidence. And I would be the last person to attack people encouraging the rest of us to use our ability to be rational, thereby defending the value and the necessity of science. But I will lift a querying hand when the notion of 'science' is held to be immutable, because 'science' as such does not exist. Science is a process to be sure, a way of thinking, but what science is above all is that which scientists do, and alas, scientists are people, too. As potentially fallible, irrational, biased, greedy, in short, as flawed, as the rest of us. So, by all means defend science as a process. But don't confuse it with the very human endeavor of science as a profession. Because they're not the same thing. And this is why when some guy in a white lab-coat says 'you can trust me, I'm a scientist,' best take it with a big bucket of salt, and then say 'Fine, now show me the evidence and more to the point, show me how you got to it. ~ Steven Erikson

Workingmen are at the foundation of society. Show me that product of human endeavor in the making of which the workingman has had no share, and I will show you something that society can well dispense with. ~ Samuel Gompers

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching. ~ Bill Gates

The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it. ~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity.
Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian cannot therefore be indifferent to any branch of ernest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated false or else in order to be made useful to the kingdom of God.
The church must not only seek to conquer every man for Christ, but also the whole of the man. ~ J. Gresham Machen

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

Integrity is the greatest commodity that pays the highest salary in any human endeavor. Integrity really pays ~ Michael Quansah

I ran the Boston Marathon out of love. I believe that love is the basis of all meaningful human endeavor. Yet it was a love that was incomplete until it was shared with others. ~ Bobbi Gibb

When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent directly or indirectly, in the assay. ~ Samuel G. Blythe

Speculating (and this includes investing and trading) is the only human endeavor in which what feels good is the right thing to do. ~ Jim Paul

The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013. ~ Steve Sabol

He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings - all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Science and technology contribute to the fast-expanding vocabularies of all living civilized tongues at a faster rate than all other fields of human endeavor put together. ~ Mario Pei

War is far too crucial a part of human endeavor to leave it entirely in the hands of generals, law is far too critical a part of human endeavor to leave it entirely in the hands of lawyers, and education is far too important a human endeavor to leave it entirely in the hands of educators.
-MWN ~ Maynard Nordmoe

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor. ~ John Huston

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. ~ Albert Einstein

Consistent participation in the act and spirit of Early Morning Prayer will eradicate from your life the things that create the majority of all spiritual inconsistencies. Almost all of the works of the flesh that continually disrupt the flow of God can be eliminated totally by a commitment to diligently seeking God at the break of each new day. When every day is begun with a fresh pursuit of the presence of God, none of the inconsistencies of human endeavor will be able to dominate. ~ Tony Bailey

In every human endeavor, persistence is everything. ~ Joan Rivers

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. ( ... ) However bad life may seem ( ... ) While there's life, there is hope. ~ Stephen Hawking

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor. ~ J. Paul Getty

As a well cut diamond has many facets, each reflecting a different color of light, so does the word yoga, each facet reflecting a different shade of meaning and revealing different aspects of the entire range of human endeavor to win inner peace and happiness. ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

Each component of this trinity of human endeavor - science, religion, and art - lays powerful claim to our feelings of wonder, which derive from an embrace of the mysterious. Where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does vi ~ John Dewey

In war, where imperfect intelligence, the threat of a catastrophe, and the number of accidents are incomparably greater than any other human endeavor, the amount of missed opportunities, so to speak, is therefore bound to be greater. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. Ask any great athlete. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. ~ Jon Krakauer

[L]ike it or not, the right timing is an inescapable part of human endeavor and thus of politics. . . . But some activists suggest that "timing" is irrelevant in public policy and politics. In their view, it's just another "excuse" by "incrementalists," another example of their traitorous cowardice, another reason why they should be condemned and purged. . . . There is a fundamental ethical and practical difference between compromise and prudently fighting for the most good that can be gained in the face of overwhelming odds. . . . Realizing the constraints and limits of this world should guard us against unrealistic expectations of what politics can or should achieve. And yet, the examples of Wilberforce and Lincoln, among many others, demonstrate that moral purpose can be successfully pursued in politics with prudence. ~ Clarke D. Forsythe

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it. ~ Abraham Verghese

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God. ~ H.R. Rookmaaker

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet ~ Max Beerbohm

A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression. ~ John L. Phillips

The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. ~ Daniel James Brown

When young Black boys learn that there are no limits to our possibilities on the basketball courts, we create the athletic genius of Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and in their genius, they recreate the game of basketball. When our young people know that there are no limits to their potential in the world of manufacturing, communication, physics, chemistry or the science of the human mind, then those same young Black minds who create dances on the dance floor or compose music on their bodies with the 'hand jive' will recreate these fields of human endeavor with the same incomparability. ~ Na'im Akbar

The work of a person laboring in some humble occupation is no less relevant to the well-being of society than that of, for example, a doctor, a teacher, a monk, or a nun. All human endeavor is potentially great and noble. So long as we carry out our work with good motivation, thinking, "My work is for others," it will be of benefit to the wider community. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

Trying to restrict a human endeavor of any scope to color-coded charts and graphs is foolish and doomed to failure. It's not how people work, and it's not how projects progress. ~ Jeff Sutherland

Space is not an enterprise that belongs to the U.S. or to Russia or to China - it is a human endeavor and experience. And that's as it should be. ~ Scott Carpenter

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement. ~ Ben Bernanke

The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavor. ~ Gustave De Molinari

To live in love is life's greatest challenge. It requires more sublety, flexibility, sensitivity, understanding, acceptance, tolerance, knowledge and strength than any other human endeavor. ~ Leo Buscaglia

All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor. ~ Harry S. Truman

The terror in which English capitalists now stand of organized proletarian resistance gives to the naturally protected craft organizations the power to receive the wages they demand. They act as they have been trained to act by capitalist society, which denies the doctrine of the Just Price, which proclaims work to be an evil and the goal of human endeavor to be the avoidance of it; which puts it up as an ideal that individuals should get as much money as they possibly can out of their fellows by any means in their power. ~ Hilaire Belloc

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ~ Carl Sagan

Impossible? Utopic?
Sure!
But for how long?
Can any human endeavor be eternally impossible or utopic ?
A time factor should be integrated to every affirmation of utopia, or else the people affirming that would only be affirming that they are not the ones who can make it happen. ~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

The greatest thing ever in the history of the world and of all of human endeavor from time immemorial is stories. ~ Rainn Wilson

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and found ~ Donna Tartt

All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another? ~ Nick Hanauer

Roads remain the essential network of the non-virtual world. They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends. They are the paths of human endeavor. ~ Ted Conover

To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the ~ Cornel West

Education is about inviting every single person who enters a school to realize his or her relatively boundless potential in all areas of worthwhile human endeavor. It is concerned with more than grades, attendance, and academic achievement. It is concerned with the process of becoming a decent and productive human being. ~ William Watson Purkey

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels "real bad" about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows. ~ Joan Didion

(Many religions, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, use light and fire as symbols for the presence of God, perhaps because light, like God, cannot be seen but permits us to see everything there is, perhaps because fire liberates the energy hidden in a log of wood or a lump of coal just as God liberates the potential energy to do good things that is hidden in every human being, just as God will be the fire that burns within Moses, enabling him to do the great things he will go on to do, but not consuming him in the process.) ~ Harold S. Kushner

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes. ~ Philip Pullman

When a stranger on the street makes a sexual comment, he is making a private assessment of me public. And though I've never been seriously worried that I would be attacked, it does make me feel unguarded, unprotected.

Regardless of his motive, the stranger on the street makes an assumption based on my physique: He presumes I might be receptive to his unpoetic, unsolicited comments. (Would he allow a friend to say "Nice tits" to his mother? His sister? His daughter?) And although I should know better, I, too, equate my body with my soul and the result, at least sometimes, is a deep shame of both.

Rape is a thousand times worse: The ultimate theft of self-control, it often leads to a breakdown in the victim's sense of self-worth. Girls who are molested, for instance, often go on to engage in risky behavior - having intercourse at an early age, not using contraception, smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. This behavior, it seems to me, is at least in part because their self-perception as autonomous, worthy human beings in control of their environment has been taken from them. ~ Leora Tanenbaum

You have people with high standards and values as well as people with low ones no matter where you are ~ Amanda Lee

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Often what is nearest is hardest of all to see - try asking a fish to define water. Distance opens a door to revelation. When the first great distances of space were conquered by technology, a camera altered the human perspective on the Earth as radically as Galileo did when he proved the sun was the center of the universe. The ecology movement was born from a photographically altered consciousness. ~ Vicki Goldberg

The Devil can so completely assume the human form, when he wants to deceive us, that we may well lie with what seems to be a woman, of real flesh and blood, and yet all the while 'tis only the Devil in the shape of a woman. 'Tis the same with women, who may think that a man is in bed with them, yet 'tis only the Devil; and ... the result of this connection is oftentimes an imp of darkness, half mortal, half devil ... ~ Martin Luther

Yeah. And Savitar predates him. He has presided over this council since the very beginning, and notice, Savitar looks about thirty. We don't know what he is, but he ain't one of us and he ain't human. And trust me, you don't want to mess with him. (Paris)
Thank you for that highly unamusing summation. Next time I have insomnia, I know who to call. In the meantime, little lioness who would probably like to live another year, don't interrupt me again. I don't like it and I tend to kill the things I don't like. (Savitar) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

After all, Paul Robeson said, 'Artists are the radical voice of civilization.' Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what's better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species. ~ Harry Belafonte

The best fantasy does not offer an answer to our lives, it is an offering that acknowledges enough of the truth to resonate and add to the understanding about the human condition. ~ Isobelle Carmody

I have always been astonished by hate. Revenge and hate. That is such strange human elements. I have seen a lot of that in my life. I am just as surprised each time. By revenge and hate. ~ Odd Nerdrum

Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sharing our stories, our feelings, it is the area where we are the same that impresses me. The differences are but delightful flourishes on the surface, like different-colored costumes, and I enjoy them. But the basic ways we are human, the basic ways we simply are, stand out to me now. I came to see we are all really one, and I no longer feel alone ~ Anonymous

Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. ~ Jonathan Franzen

A blind monetary pursuit invariably, essentially and eventually leads you to a downward path as a human. ~ Sandeep Sahajpal

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her. ~ Elias Canetti

I sometimes marvel at how far I've come - blissful, even, in the knowledge that I am slowly becoming a well-evolved human being - only to have the illusion shattered by an episode of bad behaviour that contradicts the new and reinforces the old. At these junctures of self-reflection, I ask the question: "are all my years of hard work unraveling before my eyes, or am I just having an episode?" For the sake of personal growth and the pursuit of equanimity, I choose the latter and accept that, on this journey of evolution, I may not encounter just one bad day, but a group of many. ~ B.G. Bowers

I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures. ~ Romola Garai

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

During this period (of technological confinement / [and language]) the human mind has been placed in its narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our world of technological confinement. ~ Thomas Berry

Brother, I'm not depressed and haven't lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word PEACE accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctions - one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to MOTHER-DAD, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of DICK and CAROL, the girl whom he had married when he was nineteen, and from whom he had separated six years later in order to "do the right thing" by another young lady, the mother of his youngest child. ("I have three boys who ~ Truman Capote

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols ~ Aldous Huxley

A fantasy film is often improved by some kind of human reality. ~ James Mangold

People who say "no" right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying "no" but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add "sorry" or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It's human nature. They say, "Sorry, no, why, what happened? ~ Lee Child

All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartednes s. Once we recognize this we will be more inclined to cultivate it. ~ Dalai Lama

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ~ Jennifer Birkett

Apart from it, the incarnation and the ministry would lose all their significance, the crucifixion would be but a martyrdom, and the cross a symbol of the victory of death over life. By the Resurrection it was that the Crucified One was "declared to be the Son of God with power," the great truth on which the Christian's faith is founded, and to which his hope is anchored. That Christ died for our sins is the Gospel of the Christian religion regarded as a human cult. The Gospel of Christianity goes on to declare "That He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures" ~ Robert Anderson

Ever since I've been young I've been fascinated by the human body. I've written songs about it, but you can become quite morbid if you think about it too much - paranoid and a hypochondriac. ~ Ellie Goulding

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. ~ Diane Setterfield

Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Love is eternal. It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout history. Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death. ~ Vera Caspary