Human Existence Quotes - Page 7

• Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence.

  Vanna Bonta

  Character, Aspect, Existence

  "Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview". Interview with Laurel van der Linde, 2007.

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• Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Philosophy, Creative, Perception

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• Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

  A. N. Wilson

  Mother, Space, Intellectual

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• However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Unity, May, Human Nature

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• Human existence is a brutal experience to me... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it salvation is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most.

  Woody Allen

  Agony, Oasis, Agonizing

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

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• This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.

  Freya Stark

  Doe, Desert, Accessories

  Freya Stark (2011). “Baghdad Sketches: Journeys Through Iraq”, p.99, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

  Freya Stark

  Divorce, Everyday, Ordinary

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,--mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.

  Harriet Martineau

  Love, Lying, Disease

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• Sex is an aspect of human existence that has fallen prey in special measure to a very special form of theological science: the theological outgrowth or offshoot known as moral theology. Its biblical foundations are meager in the sense that nothing of the kind exists in the New Testament, so it has had to achieve its ambition largely by dint of its own efforts.

  Uta Ranke-Heinemann

  Sex, Ambition, Biblical

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• Giving and receiving love is vital to human existence. It is the glue that binds couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations.

  G. Frank Lawlis

  Love, Couple, Giving

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• Curiosity is the essence of human existence. 'Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?' I don't know. I don't have any answers to those questions. I don't know what's over there around the corner. But I want to find out.

  Gene Cernan

  Essence, Curiosity, Answers

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• In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

  Atul Gawande

  Meaningful, Pain, Sleep

  Atul Gawande (2014). “Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End”, p.162, Profile Books

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• The greatest sin is to miss the point of human existence.

  Paulo Coelho

  Missing, Existence, Humans

  FaceBook post by Paulo Coelho from Feb 25, 2014

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• Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

  Rollo May

  Believe, Creativity, Joy

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• Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

  Michael Mandelbaum

  Normal, Kind, Natural

  Michael Mandelbaum (2009). “The Case for Goliath: How America Acts As the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century”, p.9, PublicAffairs

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• Human-caused climate change threatens almost every aspect of human existence.

  Alan Lowenthal

  Climate, Aspect, Existence

  "Climate Change: Case Closed" by Rep. Alan Lowenthal, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 25, 2014.

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• All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

  Will Durant

  Wall, Democracies Have, Government

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (2012). “The Lessons of History”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Men, Law, Ideas

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• That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Believe, Answers, Problem

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.

  Tim Winton

  Children, School, Years

  Source: www.readings.com.au

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• It's one of the bases of all human existence - the relation between parents and children, whether biologically or metaphorically. It's something we can never get away from, even in a civilization where we're controlled by robots. It's the basic relationship between mature people who represent paternal and maternal figures and young people. It's universal - it's part of human existence. It's always been that way, and it will always be that way if humans remain around.

  Eugene Green

  Children, Civilization, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• We refuse to believe that this present world is the sum total of human existence.

  Max Lucado

  Believe, World, Existence

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.

  Reed Hastings

  Horse, Years, Oil

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Now we're living in a nuclear age, and the science that was supposed to be automatically for human welfare has become a nuclear - a science that gives us nuclear weapons. This is the ironic character of human history, and of human existence, which I can only explain, if I say so, in Biblical terms. Now I don't mean by this reason that I will accept every interpretation of Christianity that's derived from the Bible as many people wouldn't accept my interpretation. But that's what it means for me.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Character, Mean, Biblical

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• I think that everybody who writes believes that their work has some kind of use-value, for someone, that there's some need for it, some person or group of people out there has demanded that these words come into being. I think that you do the work for these people. You hope that you can make a living at it. Whatever your ambitions and needs are in that regard, your only real requirement is to try and dig as deeply as you can dig to make sense of the meaning of human existence.

  Tony Kushner

  Real, Believe, Ambition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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