Human Misery Quotes

From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which rnvcloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I (plickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored·me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped anyone expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? ~ Henry Miller

Often the depths of human misery can be found amongst legions of happy people. ~ Russ Woody

The state of your heart dictates whether you harbor a grudge or give grace, seek self-pity or seek Christ, drink human misery or taste God's mercy. ~ Max Lucado

And the self concern which is our torment, whether we know it or not, must find an antidote when we let our imagination stray over the human misery now in the world. The common lot of men binds us to each other and if we will, we may pluck virtue from tragedy. ~ Julie Summers

Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history. ~ Isaac Bonewits

Flavius's foot catches on a metal grate over a circular opening in the floor, and my stomach contracts when I think of why a room would need a drain. The stains of human misery that must have been hosed off these white tiles ... ~ Suzanne Collins

I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [ ... ] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort ~ Henry Miller

So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bides the soul be rid of it. ~ Herman Melville

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms. ~ Blaise Pascal

The mess we are making of our planet is caused by our own greed, hatred, and delusion. Aside from the existential afflictions of aging, death, and at least some of the illnesses, every instance we see of human misery, injustice, affliction. or sufficient and pain will, upon sufficient and sometimes even cursory investigation, be shown to be rooted in the attachment, aversion, or ignorance of some person or some group of people together. ~ Andrew Olendzki

The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated. ~ Isaac Asimov

I find that the whole weight of relieving human misery and distress falls on the shoulders of those Heretics and Infidels; and though great part of this distress has been occasioned by those ravening wolves' hopeful converts. ~ Anne Royall

Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons ... and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery ... All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause. ~ Victoria Woodhull

Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord's wounds at arm's length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people's lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people. ~ Pope Francis

If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery. ~ Michael Harrington

If human misery and efficient boredom could be beautiful, there would have been a kind of beauty in the endlessly replicated, hot-desking, rack-mounted workers and their swiftly exchangeable work stations. Lit up by the dead light of our monitors we would constantly scratch at our keyboards - it could have been sadly romantic, if it hadn't been for the sirens. Hanging ~ Mike Daisey

Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war. ~ John Ortberg

Whoever increases the sum of human joy, is a worshiper. He who adds to the sum of human misery, is a blasphemer. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery. ~ Isaac Asimov

The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars. ~ Arthur C. Brooks

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes, as Wertheimer said, I thought. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That's why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people's lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated. ~ Kevin Cotter

There were nights when I left the sessions physically and emotionally drained after hearing the anguish pour out like blood from a gaping wound. Don't let anyone ever tell you different – psychotherapy is one of the most taxing endeavors known to mankind; I've done all sorts of work, from picking carrots in the scorching sun to sitting on national committees in paneled board rooms, and there's nothing that compares to confronting human misery hour after hour and bearing the responsibility for easing that misery using only one's mind and mouth. At its best it's tremendously uplifting as you watch the patient open up, breathe, let go of the pain. At its worst is like surfing in a cesspool struggling for balance while being slapped with wave after putrid wave. ~ Jonathan Kellerman

Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of. ~ Phineas Quimby

Buddha, tends to suggest a different solution: Wanting is the cause of all human misery. Learn to want less. Accept that life is painful. Face the existential emptiness that is an essential part of our nature. ~ Anonymous

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse ~ Cormac McCarthy

Still, despite the satisfaction of their surface lives, Cora Grovians share in full measure the pain that is the basis of all human misery: the fact that we can never be as important to anyone else as we are to ourselves.
There simply is never enough love. ~ Lynn Hall

I believe that this neglected, wounded, inner child of the past is the major source of human misery. ~ John Bradshaw

Never before has man had such a great capacity to control his own environment, to end hunger, poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and human misery. We have the power to make the best generation of mankind in the history of the world. ~ John F. Kennedy

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery. ~ Norman Borlaug

A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, ~ Ian McEwan

Was it really worth it? I wondered again.

I wanted to believe it had been but could not help feeling cynical about how history repeats itself. There still were the same political intrigues, the hate groups that thrive on terror and human misery and I knew that there were enough egos and self-indulging crusaders to fuel another war, and another... ~ Helene Deschamps-Adams

And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play. ~ Emile Zola

The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty. ~ Tanith Lee

Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery? ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski

As mercy is God's goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is his goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Human misery was the trough from which she now fed herself and she felt more comfortable in the presence of other unlucky people. It made her feel less alone, less diminished. ~ Andrew Neiderman

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery. ~ Sam Harris

(...) greed that preys on human misery (...) ~ Michael J. Sandel

Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There's no such thing as permanence at all. ~ U. G. Krishnamurti

Most people in our culture have been treated like objects all their lives. This is the source of the wound to the soul underlying most of the human misery that therapists encounter. Because people have come to experience themselves as objects, they in turn objectify other people and commodify the world. They feel alienated, isolated, and empty, believing their lives hold no meaning. ~ Linda Buzzell

The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it. ~ Simone Weil

It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery. ~ Lena Dunham

Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination, - imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering - something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than mt own prick. ~ Philip Roth

When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us. ~ John Howard Griffin

Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity. ~ Voltaire

Even when they're not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery. ~ Tom Chatfield

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient. ~ N. T. Wright

I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness. ~ Saul Leiter

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom. ~ Simone Weil

Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster. ~ Frederick Lenz

Throughout history, adultery has had few rivals as a cause of murder and human misery. The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us. ~ Jared Diamond

Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery. ~ Sam Harris

The principal sources of human misery may fairly be said to lie in the over-possession, under-possession, and the unwise use of economic goods. ~ Georgia Harkness

It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death? ~ Alom Shaha

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs. ~ Euripides

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Self-interest and mutual interest are inextricably linked. National interests can best be advanced through collective action, ... Calculate not just the human misery of the poor themselves. Calculate our loss: The aid, the lost opportunity to trade, the short-term consequences of the multiple conflicts; the long-term consequences on the attitude to the wealthy world of injustice and abject deprivation amongst the poor. ~ Tony Blair

We must take proactive steps to promote democracy and human rights abroad. ~ Sam Brownback

The most valuable things in life are priceless. They are courage, compassion, wisdom, respect for ourselves and others, and a host of characteristics that we call the beauty of the human spirit. ~ Herbie Hancock

A clean break, like an amputation. Eventually, you realized you could survive without all your limbs, that you could function and even thrive, because human beings were designed to take a battering. And though you weren't whole, you at least had a son. And though it sometimes seemed as if your heart had stopped beating, you at least knew that somewhere in the world, another heart was beating for you. ~ Beatriz Williams

Everywhere I go I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making. ~ Norman Angell

The current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up. ~ Andrew Sullivan

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood ~ Henry David Thoreau

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. ~ Jules Romains

The questions of God – meaning in Milton's phrase "The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" – I don't think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that's the religious impulse. It's not a laundry list of moral dos and don'ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it's a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it. ~ Terence McKenna

The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best. ~ Bertrand Russell

It's definitely a struggle to prove yourself just as a good human being. I'm so proud of who I am and what I've become, the morals I have, and the people that I'm surrounded by. ~ Tina Yothers

We're at a point in history that whether the Internet is going to evolve in a way that's compatible with democracy and human rights is really kind of up in the air. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human
condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character. ~ James Hillman

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the gr ~ George Mangels

Statistics cannot substitute for the human being before you; statistics embody averages, not individuals. ~ Jerome Groopman

Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent. ~ Jared Diamond

I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn't I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn't fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots.
The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. "Hey," I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn't he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn't he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic.
"Oh, hello," I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn't I have any respect for myself?
I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. "What're you doing in there?" I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans.
"Hiding," I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist.
"Well, c'mere," he said softly.
My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON ~ Ree Drummond

Every day starts, my eyes open and I reload the program of misery. I open my eyes, remember who I am, what I'm like, and I just go, 'Ugh'. ~ Louis C.K.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered. ~ Abdallah II Of Jordan

If we live by subhuman means we might as well never have had the good fortune to be born human. ~ Ihara Saikaku

Amid the awful darkness, apparently forsaken of God, Christ had drained the last dregs in the cup of human woe. In those dreadful hours He had relied upon the evidence of His Father's acceptance heretofore given Him. He was acquainted with the character of His Father; He understood His justice, His mercy, and His great love. By faith He rested in Him whom it had ever been His joy to obey. And as in submission He committed Himself to God, the sense of the loss of His Father's favor was withdrawn. By faith, Christ was victor. ~ Ellen G. White

It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated. ~ David Bohm

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies - and died younger - than the populations of human foragers who preceded them. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." Bill Parcells thought Taylor's size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants' scouts were scouring the country for young men six three or taller, 240 pounds or heavier, with speed. They could be found. In that pool of physical specimens what was precious - far more precious than an inch, or ten pounds, or one tenth of a second - was Taylor's peculiar energy and mind: relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance. ~ Michael Lewis

This is nobody's fault, swiftly be assured; being human beings with personal opinions and brains, we are respondent to any shreds of beauty we can get; I myself am hopelessly respondent to it! ~ J.D. Salinger

99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more. ~ Olivia Laing

Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be the greatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere of knowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentially perverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man something in his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay the noblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits of depravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the human race, in which villainy
nay, cruelty
is to be found in that degree. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Money was money, but I didn't want to waste any time away from Pidge.
She was happier than I'd ever seen her, and for the first time, I felt like a normal, whole human being instead of some broken, angry man. ~ Jamie McGuire

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. ~ Cynthia Ozick

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination. ~ Samuel Butler

It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human "Jesus," a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God. ~ Richard Rohr

I am a single cell in the body of four billion cells. The body is humankind. I am a single cell. My needs are individual but they are not unique. I am interlocked with other human beings in the consequences of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. I will work for human unity and human peace; for a moral order in harmony with the order of the universe. Together we share the quest for a society of the whole equal to our needs, a society in which we need not live beneath our moral capacity, and in which justice has a life of its own. We are single cells in a body of four billion cells. The body is humankind.
Norman Cousins, Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, 1981 ~ Norman Cousins

Annabeth shook her head. "All these years sneaking around, and we could've just been ourselves?"
"You should always do that." Alex strolled alongside, back in human form, though he still had a few flamingo feathers stuck in his hair. "And you have to flaunt the weird, my friends."
"I'm going to quote you on that," Percy said.
"You'd better. ~ Rick Riordan

Just imagine, among 8.7 million species, only one has become smart enough to ponder over the meaning of life. This simple evolutionary fact itself implies the gravitas of human life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I think the whole human-induced greenhouse gas thing is a red herring ... I see climate change as due to the ocean circulation pattern. I see this as a major cause of climate change ... These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans and CO2. ~ William M. Gray

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression. ~ Edward Snowden

If people care about you, they won't give up on you, no matter what you've done in the past or what you do in the future.

We aren't programmed that way. We're made to find hope in the most hopeless of places and in the people that seem the least likely to deserve it, because they really need it the most, and something in us knows that, at least subconsciously.

It's what makes us human. No one is unworthy. Not even you. If people want to have faith in you, let them. And really, you can't stop them. It's not up to you. ~ Lindy Zart

What is inside of you besides this human stuff of veins and bones and existential longing? ~ Gabby Bess