Humanness Quotes

In our humanness we can't handle all His holiness; so God, in mercy, raises the veil and dwells in mystery. ~ James MacDonald

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Nonviolence presupposes a level of humanness--however low it may be, in every human being. ~ Narayan Desai

Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. ~ Erik Larson

The more that you are being your ideas, the less human you are. The deeper your realization, being in your heart, the more of your humanness you come into. ~ John De Ruiter

Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep ... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical. ~ Os Guinness

Souls always do recognize themselves. It is the humanness that surrounds and embodies the soul that fails to recognize or make sense of the wonderment that dwells and resides at the center of whom we are; who we need to become. ~ David Michelinie

What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are ... because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier ... for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own ... ~ Frederick Buechner

To finish building the free society dreamed of by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, we must draw upon the resources of the enlightened imagination, which can be systematically developed by the spiritual sciences of India and Tibet. We have not yet tamed our own demons of racism, nationalism, sexism, and materialism. We have not yet made peace with a land we took by force and have only partly paid for. We are a teeming conglomeration of people from different tribes who have yet to embrace fully the humanness in one another. And none of us can be really free until all of us are. ~ Robert Thurman

There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity? ~ Carlos Castaneda

If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man. ~ Vaclav Havel

I have seen in the Halls of Congress more idealism, more humanness, more compassion, more profiles of courage than in any other institution that I have ever known. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Mum and I were both there at the moment that Cal died, and sometimes I worry that seeing that has altered something so fundamental about us. Sometimes I worry we lost some of our humanness that day, and It's not coming back. ~ Cath Crowley

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old. ~ Toni Morrison

However great an intellectual may be, however great one may be as a scholar or a man of learning, one has also to acquire humanness. Without humanness, scholarship and intellectual eminence are of no value. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Be willing to laugh at your humanness and at your divinity. ~ Frederick Lenz

When you are awakened to being a being, even though you're not yet being it, the purpose of you being in a body fundamentally shifts. In that shift, you know within that you are not first any longer about your humanness. Your humanness is included and it's no longer fundamental, altering your sense of reality. ~ John De Ruiter

You should've told me Tess," I murmured against her hair. "You helped me find my humanness but you took it away with your lies. ~ Pepper Winters

Celebrate your humanness, celebrate your craziness, celebrate your inadequacies, celebrate your loneliness ... but celebrate YOU! ~ Leo Buscaglia

We live in a culture that paces itself to the speed of machines. We are trying like good little robots to match our speed with theirs. Humans cannot move at the same rate as machines. When we attempt to, we lose contact with our own humanness. ~ Tian Dayton

I've learned that to expose yourself, to reveal yourself is a test of your humanness. ~ Isabelle Adjani

The Christian story proclaims that all the demands of Scripture are ultimately summons, calls, invitations - beckoning us to experience true, beautiful, and good humanness. ~ Wesley Hill

I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition - that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are - even if we tell it only to ourselves - because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. ~ Frederick Buechner

Love can exist only after meditation, not before it. That is a simple existential law. Before meditation - only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows. ~ Rajneesh

Never let your success interfere with your humanness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Strong women- precious jewels all- their humanness is evident in their accessibility. We are able to enter into the spirit of these women and rejoice in their warmth and courage. ~ Maya Angelou

Loneliness comes over us sometimes as a sudden tide. It is one of the terms of our humanness, and, in a sense, therefore, incurable. Yet I have found peace in my loneliest times not only through acceptance of the situation, but through making it an offering to God, who can transfigure it into something for the good of others. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me. ~ Daniel Keyes

Your doubt doesn't exclude you from faith, no matter what you may have heard - it simply proves your humanness and His unfathomable Godness. But doubt doesn't have to define you or rule you; rather, it can be the fuel for discussion, study, and prayer. In order to own your faith, you have to continue the conversation. You have to allow yourself to be wrong, to question and to be taught. As long as you remain unteachable, rigid in your disbelief and doubt, you will remain in limbo, unable to firmly stand on either your conviction or suspicion. But in either case, to own one or the other you must ultimately be owned by your belief. You are owned by your faith or doubt when you turn yourself over to it fully. ~ Hayley DiMarco

In the heart's deepest place, where the burden of ego is dropped and the mystery of soul is penetrated, a man finds the consciousness there not different in any way from what all other men may find. The mutuality of the human race is thus revealed as existing only on a plane where its humanness is transcended. This is why all attempts to express it in political and economic terms, no less than the theosophic attempts to form a universal brotherhood, being premature, must be also artificial. This is why they failed. ~ Paul Brunton

And so the beautiful truth is that since we were created by a community, we were created for community. If we are made in God's image and God is a community, then that means we are rejecting our humanness when we live isolated and alone. That's fundamental to what it means to be human. That is intimacy. ~ Jefferson Bethke

For me, hands are hard." She looks up from what she's doing. "Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back." Cadavers occasionally effect a sort of accidental humanness that catches the medical professional off guard. I once spoke to an anatomy student who described a moment in the lab when she realized that the cadaver's arm was around her waist. It becomes difficult, under circumstances such as these, to retain one's clinical remove. ~ Mary Roach

The blues demand of theology a prophetic criticism that contests all arbitrary uses of power or coercion, that challenges individual acquisitive materialism, that repudiates any and every attempt to undermine humanity's very humanness, and that cherishes the lives of ordinary everyday children and women and men of all cultures and races. ~ M. Shawn Copeland

This in essence is my goal. To set an example by doing what is good. If I live openly and honestly, I set an example of virtue, humanness, restoration, and healing. I give others permission to join me on my journey despite the fear of failure or the rejection it might elicit when they know they are not alone in their experience. The more of us who amass the courage to embark openly on this path, the more normal this experience becomes, effectively eliminating the tactic of shame and isolation that the enemy so often uses to cause us to falter. ~ Riisa Renee

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we're actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons. ~ John Green

The enumeration of human values as five - Truth, Righteousness, Peace, Love and Non-violence is not correct. They are all facets of the foundational humanness. They grow together; they are absence of Inner conflicts. How can one have peace when he revels in violence of speach and action? ~ Sathya Sai Baba

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer's feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist's love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it 'superhuman'; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity.

Maslow's importance is that he has placed these experiences of 'transcendence' at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of 'the source of power, meaning and purpose' inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called 'generalised hypertension', a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a 'passively negative' attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstrea ~ Colin Wilson

Humanness is a window thrown against a wall. ~ Donald Revell

Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all. ~ Tom Stoppard

For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened," He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love. ~ Brennan Manning

The Gospel is not meant to make people odd or less than fully human; it is mean to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness. ~ N. T. Wright

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap. ~ Florence King

Wouldn't it be great if we could be a little less judgmental and a little more forgiving of each other's humanness? We're only here a short time. Let's pay more attention to the good and not the bad in one another. ~ Patrick Fabian

Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved. And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals - the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her. Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness. He ~ Mary Balogh

The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through execution, exile, imprisonment, persecution, defamation, or harassment - at the behest of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to a moral death, the death of their humanness. That, of all the ways of dying, is the most ignominious. ~ William Stringfellow

Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption. ~ John Zerzan

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn't that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it's a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it's all mixed up together, it's us: humanness. ~ Pema Chodron

Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness. ~ Tim Crouch

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.
We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. ~ Jeanette Winterson

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness. ~ Hermann Broch

Whether the autistic subject is inscribed as 'nearly' developed or 'under' developed, developmental discourses always situate the autistic subject as partially developed and thus not fully human. [...] Developmentalist discourses frame the autistic subject in need of advocacy as a kind of development project, the autistic body becomes understood as 'develop-able.' The autistic is, in other words, framed as one who needs to be taught humanness. ~ Anne McGuire

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you're coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together. ~ Pema Chodron

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine. ~ Nicholas Carr

We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it ... and to remember our Divine nature. ~ Sonia Choquette

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. ~ Walter Brueggemann

I don't want those things from you. I love your faults and imperfections. Your kind heart. The scars that match mine, and the struggles to find ourselves. I want your humanness. Nothing else. ~ A.G. Howard

She lays her tired head on my shoulder and looks through the shell with me, into the great mystery. I think again that heaven must be like this place, and I say that to Isabelle. I wonder, When she is in heaven and I am not, how far away will she be? "It's just another journey," she whispers. . . I thought of my mother, of how desperately I wanted her to be here a little longer, a lot longer, forever. Sometimes it seemed that I should be able to change things, to alter the course of events, just by wanting it badly enough. But I couldn't. Iola's observations said as much. We, in our humanness, cannot help but foolishly desire eternity in this life. ~ Lisa Wingate

I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true ... it's like finding a river of gold when you haven't even got a cup to save a cupful ... you've but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness. ~ Jack Kerouac

Human society needs essntially fellow-feeling and unity. When these two are present, humanness will flourish. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

It is the quintessential story about perseverance but also about our humanness. We tend to regard ourselves as super-human, but the moment we detect a flaw we crash and lose confidence. We'd rather die than admit failure. Yet God compels us to dust ourselves off and fight another day. Like he does with James Bond. ~ Jane Christmas

We need to remember that politics is all about people, not programs. We shouldn't want to take the humanness out of the political arena. ~ J. C. Watts

What distinguishes us humans from animals is our conscience. Once our conscience is gone we lose our humanness. Without conscience, humans can be far more dangerous than beasts. Beasts kill for food, humans kill for ideology. Beasts kill just enough to eat. Humans can kill endlessly. ~ Ali Sina

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends' parents…

Then
I've got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediati ~ Kate Rushin

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they can't recognize that person's gender, the gender-changing person can evoke in others a primordial fear of monstrosity, or loss of humanness. ~ Susan Stryker

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event - in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It's the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It's the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you'll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It's one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It's not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it's the essence of ambition. ~ Dave Harvey

For how can any human be separate from humanity and humanness? ~ Kamand Kojouri

It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God. ~ Tom Stoppard

I really feel a sense of responsibility first as a creation of a force that I call God, that's bigger than myself. And because I'm black, I feel the responsibility to that. I feel the responsibility to my womanness. But more importantly, I feel a responsibility to my humanness. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Remember to view yourself and your humanness with a kind heart. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink; our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbours, colleagues, family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image. ~ Elif Safak

ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS ~ William Gibson

Your sexuality is the engine of your humanness. Freed of your self, it is an engine of movement. It isn't there to move your experience, but to move your being into your experience, bringing your being into the physicality of your self. ~ John De Ruiter

Anytime a sage displays humanness - in regard to money, food, sex, relationships - we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. ~ Ken Wilber

If men were to colonize the moon or Mars - even with abundant supplies of oxygen, water, and food, as well as adequate protection against heat, cold, and radiation - they would not long retain their humanness, because they would be deprived of those stimuli which only Earth can provide. Similarly, we shall progressively lose our humanness even on Earth if we continue to pour filth into the atmosphere; to befoul soil, lakes, and rivers; to disfigure landscapes with junkpiles; to destroy wild plants and animals that do not contribute to monetary values; and thus transform the globe into an environment alien to our evolutionary past. The quality of human life is inextricably interwoven with the kinds and variety of stimuli man receives from the Earth and the life it harbors, because human nature is shaped biologically and mentally by external nature. (Rene Dubos qtd. in Kaltreider) ~ Kurt Kaltreider

At the present moment, in the prevailing situation, what is most essential is the cultivation of love. Losing love mankind has lost its humanness. Love is the Supreme human value. Truth, righteousness, peace and non-violence are other human values. Knowing these values, men are foolishly leading valueless lives. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...

[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness. ~ Jesse Owens

Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness. ~ Mark Nepo

Only when we accept and forgive all that is or has been the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human lives can we get off the guilt trip and back into the flow. That means we must love our humanness and all of our failings; we must accept, learn from, and yes, even love our mistakes. ~ Sonia Choquette

The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows. ~ Breyten Breytenbach

I don't like taking a sly picture on the side. I like the direct approach. I want to be as honest to myself and the subject as possible. And I'm depending on their humanness to come through. ~ Jurgen Teller

Remember also that the great complaint carnival is not a celebration; it's a bandwagon of misery. Our complaints trivialize our experience - both at work and in our personal lives. When we complain, we disconnect. When we complain, we hold whatever or whoever we're complaining about as a shield between us. We perpetuate an old community of victimization and helplessness. But when we take the time to communicate about our fears and insecurities - our real lives - we connect on a deeper, authentic level. When we connect through this deeper humanness, we create a new community of support and possibility ~ Alex Pattakos

I think we need to develop a powerful dose of tolerance to understand each other's humanness. None of us is perfect. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

When we listen for feelings and needs - we can see that people who seem like monsters are simply human beings whose language and behavior sometimes keep us from seeing their humanness. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

If God wasn't mightily amused by our humanness, I figure he'd have wiped us out a long time ago. ~ Jill Conner Browne

We cannot grow spiritually if we ignore our humanness, just as we cannot become fully human if we ignore our spirituality. ~ Jean Vanier

In the first, a tornado approached and I led her and others up a fire escape that ultimately dead-ended against a brick wall. In the second dream she and I were taking an examination and neither of us knew the answers. I welcomed these dreams because they informed the patient of my limits, my humanness, my having to grapple with the same fundamental problems of life that she did. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Love is at once the most creative and yet simultaneously destructive force in the world, and thus, in our lives. And I don't mean the Hallmark sentimental type of love, although that is part of it. But a deeper obligation that we have to each other: the obligation to reflect our humanness at each other, to reflect back the things others show us and we, them. ~ Chris Abani

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness. ~ Paul Strand

Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being. ~ Simon Van Booy

But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that's all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere. ~ Sarah Winman

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. ~ Caryll Houselander

I am fascinated by how our humanness manifests in our daily lives and relationships. I find that many of us have constructed a persona that is safe to present to the world. We go to great lengths to pretend and hide our flaws and vulnerabilities from others. The truth is that we are flawed and that is what makes us interesting. ~ Kris Macc

I don't subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we're all the same and race doesn't exist. It's a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we should concentrate on similarities is that they're ignoring glaring parts of our humanness - our skin, perhaps the color of our hair, the way we speak, or even the shape of our eyes. ~ Simon S. Tam

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost. ~ Edward Bond

When your humanness is confronted by the magnificence and holiness of God, you are made SO aware of your need for God's grace ... Romans 12:1 teaches us how to live this life of worship and love. ~ Darlene Zschech

Along with unemployment neurosis, which is triggered
by an individual's socioeconomic situation,
there are other types of depression which are traceable
back to psychodynamic or biochemical conditions,
whichever the case may be. Accordingly, psychotherapy
and pharmacotherapy are indicated respectively.
Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned,
however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se,
it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof
of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by
anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological
reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just
consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the
young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that
the three facets of this syndrome - depression, aggression,
addiction - are due to what is called in logotherapy
"the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and
meaninglessness. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Sure. I'll make small talk. Chit chat.
Discuss the ins and outs of a "typical" day.
Pass the time lightly. Say tiny things.
I'm happy to tread surfaces with a smile,
and will. Sometimes.

Yet- when I look at you,
I know there are layers.
Dimensions. Collections of ancient wisdom.
Roads. Stories on stories on stories.
Core needs.

There is humanness.

This is where I light up.
This is where I thrive.

You can't be caged in a pool for long.
Not when you're someone
who wants oceans. ~ Victoria Erickson