Of Human Bondage Quotes

Rigorously investigated and fearlessly reported, A Crime So Monstrous is a passionate and thorough examination of the appalling reality of human bondage in today's world. In his devastating narrative, Ben Skinner boldly casts light on the unthinkable, yet thriving, modern-day practice of slavery, exposing a global trade in human lives. The abuses detailed in these pages are repugnant, but there is hope to be found: by giving voice to the victims, Skinner helps restore their dignity and makes crucial strides toward closing this shameful chapter in history. ~ William J. Clinton

Of Human Bondage?"

Will said quickly, moving just out of sight for a moment and forcing Charlie to move to the edge of the dining area to see him. He tossed one arch look over his shoulder as he reached up to grab that book, and even knowing it was an act, Charlie felt himself tensing. His eyes fell on the leather cuff at Will's wrist, as they were probably meant to.

"Kinky."

Charlie's throat locked. "I'm not..."

"Into Bette Davis? I know, a lot of people find her scary at first, but after awhile you really start to get into her."

The completely reasonable tone was at odds with the wicked light in the kid's eyes, the way his lips were curved up, how he held his breath when Charlie blinked and frowned, replaying the insane words until they made sense. Until he remembered that Bette Davis was in the film version of that novel, until he could finally take his gaze off that wide leather band.

His face was burning.

"Smartass," he muttered, completely mystified when being called a smartass made Will hop in place, since Will had already made it clear that he had a brain under all that hair and glitter. ~ R. Cooper

Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The
answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions,
there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come notas the climax of creation
but as a physical reaction to the environment.
- Of Human Bondage - ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. ~ James Lee Burke

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated. ~ T.H. White

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes. ~ James Altucher

Many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. ~ Ken Robinson

I'm a student of violence because I'm a student of the human heart. ~ Sam Peckinpah

Anybody who knows anything knows how delicate and exacting a matter it is to try to tune in harmony two human beings, almost constitutionally out of tune even with themselves, full of strange complicated weaknesses and unexpected beauties and strength. Add to that the element of children, each of whom brings a full equipment of strange unexplored possiblities, and any fool can see that no outside complications are needed to make the problem a difficult one.
"Marital Relations ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning. ~ Billy Graham

Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men's evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them. ~ John Calvin

Jesus was in a garden, not of delight as the first Adam, in which he destroyed himself and the whole human race, but in one of agony, in which he saved himself and the whole human race. ~ Blaise Pascal

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern. ~ Milan Kundera

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another ~ John Shelby Spong

We live in graves and call them home, and we further sustain the neurotic structure of those graves with elements of so-called sociological, cultural, traditional, religious, political and intellectual significance. ~ Abhijit Naskar

If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness. ~ Ayn Rand

I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly ... It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one. ~ Tom Clancy

It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding ... Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.
To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history. ~ Timothy Snyder

Edmund Clowney observes that prayer involves an honesty that has no real parallel in human relationships, because every human relation necessarily involves only a part of your personality. We relate differently to our spouse, our business partner, and a chance acquaintance on the street because each of our social roles expresses only a part of our personhood. Even our spouse sees only part of who we are. "In relation to God, however, we are 'naked and pinned down' (Heb 4:13). Our masks are gone, pretense is useless: the relationship is not partial, but total. All that we are stands related to our Maker and Redeemer."245 ~ Timothy J. Keller

And what is sin?' said Cotgrave.
'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
'Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is. ~ Arthur Machen

Another scream left me, as I beat my fists into the cement floor. Blood dripped from my aching skin, the wounds reminding me just how human I truly was. That I had a heart, that I could bleed, that I could very well die. My eyes rolled to the back of my head as I surrendered myself over willingly. Protect Maggie or give into the love I desperately needed to remain human. The choice was no longer mine to make, my mind would make the decision for me. One or the other. ~ J.L. Beck

As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being. ~ Amy Bloom

There are sights that a person can witness that will not fit within the normal boundaries of consciousness or recognition. To put it simply, there are limits to the human mind that horror can surpass, and when it does, there is nothing but the void of madness waiting beyond. ~ Joe Hart

As I work among my flowers, I find myself talking to them, reasoning and remonstrating with them, and adoring them as if they were human beings. Much laughter I provoke among my friends by so doing, but that is of no consequence. We are on such good terms, my flowers and I. ~ Celia Thaxter

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible. ~ Elie Wiesel

Trotsky's view that the gap between aspiration and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that tragedy will be permanently relevant to the contemporary human experience, seems far more faithful to Marx's view ... ~ Alasdair McIntyre

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. ~ Elliott Abrams

Week 1:
'One hundred percent of positive-ness, will raise us to the point of successful-ness, in reaching our level of human kindness. ~ Ali Marsman

Almost from the minute we agreed it would be ok for him to run, Barack became a kind of human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew- ~ Michelle Obama

The word "canon" is derived from a Hebrew word signifying "reed" (qaneh) and by extension "measuring stick." It enters into the Greek language as "canon" (kanon) with a wider semantic range signifying exemplary standards in relation to literary works, grammatical rules, and even certain human beings. The word was coined in the early church to indicate an absolutely authoritative, complete list of God-inspired books, which was the standard of truth (Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter). Although such a list was considered closed, it is clear that the creation of the canon did not happen in an instant. It had a long and complex history before such closure occurred. The historian Josephus (AD 95) describes a closed list of inspired books that had been authoritative for all Jews for centuries (Against Apion 8). ~ J. Daniel Hays

Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history. ~ Bryant McGill

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature! ~ Thomas Mann

The creation of NIT has ensured some seats for admission in undergraduate courses for students of Arunachal Pradesh, which will bound to uplift economics of locality directly or indirectly and help in enhancing human development index in the state. ~ Pallam Raju

[H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous. ~ David Guterson

What is Truth? Truth is the attribute of when the human heart marries the love of God, and the result is passion for your spiritual path. ~ Lee Carroll

But we should also aim to create a self and a life and an artistic vision that aren't an escape from ordinary life, but a way of rendering ordinary life for people of every color, shape, size, and background more magical to them. In order to do that, we have to see that every human is divine. We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes. It will fuel us, once we see it. The ordinary people around us, the angry ones and the indifferent ones, the good ones and the bad ones, will start to glow and shimmer. ~ Heather Havrilesky

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility. ~ Niall Ferguson

What was most surprising, she was giving him the hardest thing to do first, but by failure at the great one he was learning the easier tasks with infallible power and skill. How different that is from our human way of training people, with the easiest always first. In nature animals cannot afford such long drawn-out step-by-step training. Animal children cannot be segregated in the schoolroom from the sharp experiences of life. They have to be educated in the heart of life itself. The easy and the difficult befall them without any sequence. It is a pity that in civilisation man has made the business of education so sequestered and slow. ~ Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough. ~ Donella Meadows

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The thing I was raised to be is acutely aware of how easy it would be to reach out and break this human boy. But the man I try to be keeps his arms folded instead. ~ Amie Kaufman

I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Once we can get all of mankind to see and promote our commonalities over differences, then we can also collectively and passionately enforce equality, truth and justice as the laws of every land. Then there will be stability, prosperity and true peace for all. If we do not, then language, religious, and cultural barriers will continue to prevent us from seeing that we are all one. Does a pineapple have to be called a pineapple in English in another country for an English-speaking person to know what it is? No. A pineapple has a different name in every country, but even a child can still tell its a pineapple. So why can't we judge mankind the same way? No matter how you dress a human, a human is still a human. And all humans grieve, love, and bleed the same way. How hard is it to see that we are all more similar than different? God did not disconnect mankind, man did. ~ Suzy Kassem

No cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them. ~ Peter S. Beagle

There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never."
"So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?"
"Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God. ~ John Le Carre

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Where are the real sources of human dignity, freedom and modern democracy, if not in the concept of infinity to which all men are equal? ~ Louis Pasteur

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all ... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else. ~ Katherine Mansfield

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics. ~ Pete Seeger

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness. ~ Victor Hugo

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means. ~ Terence McKenna

We owe them [animals] a decent life and a decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible. That's my job. I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back. ~ Temple Grandin