Human Worth Quotes

One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value. ~ Vladimir S. Soloviev

A host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Without that innate sense of human worth, a man cannot long endure adversity, nor can he long enjoy prosperity. ~ Confucius

What good are we if we can't imagine? ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

Motivation enhances human worth and potential. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Our stories make us who we are. And each story has its own purpose and its own reward. Each story rings true and each story is worthy of the ages. There is no such thing as an insignificant life. ~ Laurence Overmire

We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolate. Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that. ~ Eva Mozes Kor

Now and always, hard-line policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalizing and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. (41) ~ Don DeLillo

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view"
that some people with soft skins find " offensive. " It is the deep
and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments -
scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
be made whole - are then taken to be the standard of what is
normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
her - inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth - is seen as a
consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
and ~ Andrea Dworkin

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages. ~ Edward Dahlberg

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State ~ Ian McEwan

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. ~ David Foster Wallace

Lincoln prevailed: wearing his green shawl in the White House and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth. ~ Jerome Charyn

We say, then, that Scripture clearly proves this much, that God by his eternal and immutable counsel determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure one day to admit to salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, it was his pleasure to doom to destruction. We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but at the same time incomprehensible judgment ~ John Calvin

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other. It is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed. ~ Frantz Fanon

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven. ~ Emma Goldman

Truth and effort may increase human worth
But they are not enough to make us whole;
Only love can complete us. ~ Ilchi Lee

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth ~ Alain De Botton

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can't know, is kind.
I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.
I suspect that the ease of Wally's death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he's all right now.

And yet.

And yet he's gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence.
My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can't stay in that place, can't sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he's all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he's gone.
And doubt. And the fact that we can't understand, that it's our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing?
We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt's lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisio ~ Mark Doty

I know transplanted human worth will bloom to profit otherwhere. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth. ~ Gloria Steinem

If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, I have come to the conclusion that God is Truth. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain. ~ T. S. Eliot

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable. ~ Michael Shermer

Acting in its purest form is an urge from deep in the human psyche to celebrate our aliveness, to act our dreams and fantasies in a public display of our most private selves. ~ Darryl Hickman

Mistakes can be very beautiful. Mistakes lead to surprises. Even joy. And joy makes life worth living. ~ Ryan Winfield

...These stars will be gone one day for you. They will be for me, too. The Raven promises me I will turn back to sticks and dirt, and I believe him. But until then I am a human being and that is something to be. I stand on my feet and I look at the stars and I feel the seasons. If you work at it long enough, I promise you that will be enough for you...This world, every day, it's enough. ~ Joseph Monninger

All the big pop acts that I've been into over the years - whether it's ABBA or Prince - managed to combine amazing melodies and honest human emotion. But coming out of the super-super-commerical pop industry in the 90s, maybe people forgot about the fact that pop music can do both of those things. ~ Robyn

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. ~ John Le Carre

When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

the love of one true man is worth a life's devotion ~ Grace Livingston Hill

Growing up feels like your skin no longer fits. Like you just want to crawl out of that thinly stretched space and lay down in the grass and sob for hours. Instead, I am in a cafe eating lunch and trying not to scream. Looking around wondering if anyone else in this building is doing the same thing, wondering if they ever have and, if so, how they got through it. Maybe I would calm down if I just had the assurance that other people have looked in the mirror and no longer recognized themselves. Maybe if I could sit across the table from an elderly woman and have her tell me that she lived through days where the covers over her head felt even better than an embrace and weeks where she drank her tears to keep from wetting her shirt sleeves, but that those years shaped her into an iron skeleton with a tender heart. That "worth it" was an understatement. Maybe then I would feel okay. ~ Kalyn Roseanne Livernois

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art. ~ Emile Zola

So there's much more to life than one's intelligence score. To be a decent human being. To have some character. ~ Edward Zigler

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. ~ Hilaire Belloc

I am not a pessimist. I suffer and I complain, but I don't know if suffering is the general rule or if it is human to suffer... I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The crisis of physical hunger is essentially a crisis of faith. What or whom will you trust to meet your most basic needs? Will you trust the God who made human bodies, or will you seek your own way? (Deuteronomy 8:1-3) ~ Charles R. Swindoll

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawesr, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without paues and see - thrillingly, terrifyingly - that it was never her we had to fear.
It war always only us. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion. ~ Donald Worster

I read her file." Voice strong and steady again, Peabody shifted back. "I know who she was, what she was. Now I know she left you with an animal. It's good she's dead."
Stunned, Eve turned her head, stared. "That's not very Free-Ager."
"Fuck that." Peabody's eyes flashed like supernovas. "Fuck tolerance and understanding. Yeah, you'd have put her in a cage for the rest of her pathetic, evil life. But maybe sometime during her rot, she'd have put it together. Maybe she'd have remembered you. She'd have used that on you; she'd have tried. Before you scared the piss out of her, if you could get to her before Roarke. If he could get there before me. And it's good she was such a selfish, pitiful excuse for a human being so she didn't remember you, didn't think about you all those years. She might've recognized you, especially after Roarke. She might've seen you on screen, and recognized you, caused you more grief and trouble. Dead's better. ~ J.D. Robb

That which you call the devil is part of you. The myth of the devil and of evil is imposed on us by our ignorance. The human mind is a great wonder and magician. It can assume the form of both a devil and a divine being any time it wishes. It can be a great enemy or a great friend, creating either hell or heaven for us. There are many tendencies hidden in the unconscious mind which must be uncovered, faced, and transcended before one intends to tread the path of enlightenment. ~ Swami Rama

There's something about the American people: They have such an innate sense of fairness that the red light goes on and the bells go off the second you approach that line. Any kind of personal attack is verboten. You shouldn't do it; it's not worth it. ~ Roger Ailes

I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make? ~ Isaac Asimov

We are not designed to deal with the many stress-inducing situations of the twenty-first century. For most of human history, the stressors we faced were mainly physical, like running away from wild animals. Now they are almost entirely psychological. When was the last time you were frightened by a lion? The things that cause us stress in our modern world are the ones that go inside our heads. ~ Jed Diamond

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is not human to be wise,' said Blood. 'It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy. ~ Rafael Sabatini

These numbers are staggering, in fact incomprehensible. By all accounts, we are dealing with the greatest health crisis in human history. ~ Nelson Mandela

There is no worse material poverty than one that does not allow for earning one's bread and deprives one of the dignity of work. Youth unemployment, informality, and the lack of labor rights are not inevitable; they are the result of a previous social option, of an economic system that puts profit above man; if the profit is economic, to put it above humanity or above man, is the effect of a disposable culture that considers the human being in himself as a consumer good, which can be used and then discarded. ~ Pope Francis

The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality. ~ Sri Aurobindo