Human Condition Quotes - Page 3

• We should not value education as a means to prosperity, but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education, unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. . . irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it.

  Roger Scruton

  Education, Mean, Priorities

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• To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do.

  Beverly Jenkins

  Dream, Giving Up, Don't Give Up

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• ...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Odds, Vegetables, Victory

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• Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Mean, Suffering, Overcoming

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• Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair.

  Henry Fielding

  Men, Inspire, Despair

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• The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Contentment, Heartbreaking, Inability

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.128, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

  Hilary Mantel

  Memories, Theme, Humans

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• Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.

  Bob Geldof

  Depression, Thinking, Opposites

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• Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition, that’s where life starts, that’s where you start feeling yourself living.

  Philippe Petit

  Other Worlds, Feelings, Boundaries

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• The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

  Richard Misrach

  Photography, Struggle, Men

  Richard Misrach (1987). “Desert Cantos”

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• We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Want, Ambiguity, Humans

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Interesting, Suffering

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• The challenge of the retail business is the human condition.

  Howard Schultz

  Challenges, Retail, Humans

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• Everyone needs help. That's the human condition.

  Max Allan Collins

  Needs, Helping, Humans

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• [...] We have to realize that this wound [of loneliness] is inherent in the human condition and that what we have to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit in a mysterious way is living at the centre of the wound.

  Jean Vanier

  Loneliness, Fleeing, Way

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• My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

  Bruce Nauman

  People, Capacity, Aspect

  Bruce Nauman, Christine van Assche, Cristina Ricupero, Hayward Gallery (1998). “Bruce Nauman”

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• There's often a distressing disconnect between the good words we speak and the way we live our lives. In personal relations and politics, the mass media, the academy and organized religion, our good words tend to float away even as they leave our lips, ascending to an altitude where they neither reflect nor connect with the human condition. We long for words like love, truth, and justice to become flesh and dwell among us. But in our violent world, it's risky business to wrap our frail flesh around words like those, and we don't like the odds.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Odds, Media, Like Love

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• The mess of the human condition is that fundamental trust has not yet been realized. The true value of profound spiritual experience lies in the discovery of that fundamental trust.

  Andrew Cohen

  Spiritual, Freedom, Lying

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• I think music is a lifting force, I think love is the lifting force in the human condition. I think you see someone loving on their child, and it moves you, and you can't help it.

  David Crosby

  Children, Moving, Love Is

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.

  Stephen R. Donaldson

  Order, Magic, Monsters

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• The human condition is what it is. We can see beauty and wonder in the world, but we also face imminent death and uncertainty, and we often need to sidestep the idea of time and communicate with each other, not with words but with a sense of community and union. I don't want to make an overreaching statement, but I think that's the function of culture.

  Justin Adams

  Thinking, Ideas, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

  Remy de Gourmont

  Simple, Language, Poet

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• You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Forgiving, Weakness, Saws

  "Wilhelm Tell" by Friedrich Schiller, Act III, sc. i, 1803.

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• Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: "Be not afraid." Though the traditions vary widely in the ways they propose to take us beyond fear, all hold out the same hope: we can escape fear's paralysis and enter a state of grace where encounters with otherness will not threaten us but will enrich our work and our lives.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Spiritual, Fear, Effort

  Parker J. Palmer (2012). “The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life”, p.58, John Wiley & Sons

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• We are in need of a way out of our poverty of soul and the desperate state of our human condition. We find it in this child lying in a manger, who was and is Jesus Christ, the long-promised Messiah, Seed, Redeemer, and King.

  Stephen Nichols

  Jesus, Kings, Children

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