Being Human Quotes - Page 5

• The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It's not my information, it's not mine. I didn't make it. I just discovered it.

  Jeff Buckley

  People, Needs, Information

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• [What I want to communicate] doesn't have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts - understanding. But I don't really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It's not my information, it's not mine. I didn't make it. I just discovered it.

  Jeff Buckley

  Emotional, Self, People

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• I'm obsessed with being human.

  Rachelle Lefevre

  Obsessed, Humans

  "Rachelle Lefevre Interview OFF THE MAP". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. January 12, 2011.

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• Fear which has been embedded in your mind since you were a tot doesn't go away easily - it's conditioned in. And because we have fear, we fail to fulfill and realize our potential as human beings.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Humanity, Mind

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• Aesthetic life is not something sophisticated - that's a humanistic lie. Aesthetic life is as integral to being human as building sandcastles on the beach and giving your children names.

  Calvin Seerveld

  Beach, Art, Children

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• All the seven deadly sins are man's true nature. To be greedy. To be hateful. To have lust. Of course, you have to control them, but if you're made to feel guilty for being human, then you're going to be trapped in a never-ending sin-and-repent cycle that you can't escape from.

  Marilyn Manson

  Nature, Regret, Hate

  Beliefnet Interview, www.beliefnet.com. 2001.

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• If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

  Charlton Laird

  Degrees, Study, Language

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• We’re living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.

  Frank Schaeffer

  Love, Life, Family

  "Sometimes Youthful Stupidity is a Better way to Find Happiness than Making Mature Choices" by Frank Schaeffer, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 11, 2014.

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• Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

  Bill Viola

  Thinking, Keys, Intellectual

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• The aliens on this planet are also attempting to clone or replicate the human form artificially. Their original form, being humanoid, cannot pass the field that was established around the Earth. But if they can clone or cybernetically change their forms, it may help their designs. This is why virtual reality, cybernetics, cloning, and nanotechnology are in vogue today.

  Michael Tsarion

  Reality, Eugenics, Design

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• We began as mineral. We emerged into plant life, and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

  Rumi

  Spring, Animal, Plant Life

  Rumi (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.155, Penguin UK

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• Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Country, Heart, Adventure

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• Maybe it’s animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting.

  Carol Emshwiller

  Snakes, Elephants, Grace

  Carol Emshwiller (2004). “Carmen Dog”, p.158, Small Beer Press

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• Being human is being a lot of things at the same time.

  Matthias Schoenaerts

  Humans

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• I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time.

  Jenna Coleman

  Drama, Two, Dancing

  "Doctor Who’s Impossible Girl". Interview with Devon Ivie, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 19, 2014.

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• Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

  Henri Nouwen

  Mean, Compassion, Vulnerable

  Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. Morrison, Henri J. M. Nouwen (1982). “Compassion, a reflection on the Christian life”, Doubleday Books

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• Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.

  Ken Robinson

  Heart, Creative, Progress

  Ken Robinson Ph.D., Lou Aronica (2015). “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education”, p.94, Penguin

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• That's just how I see things. I think things that are the most dramatic or tragic can also look the most ridiculous and funny. That's part of being human.

  David O. Russell

  Thinking, Looks, Ridiculous

  Source: collider.com

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• I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.

  Edith Sitwell

  Animal, Humans, Regard

  Edith Sitwell (2011). “Taken Care Of: An Autobiography”, p.15, A&C Black

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• Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers. That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is. There is no American or Frenchhistory. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Dream, Distance, Fighting

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• I always think to myself, being human, having crushes now, what is it about that person that I really want? What do they represent? More freedom? Someone to care for me more? It's never really about the person.

  Darcey Steinke

  Crush, Thinking, Care

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

  Sarah Kay

  Writing, Focus, Sorrow

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• I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know.

  Mark Nepo

  Confused, Believe, Practice

  "Journey to the Sacred: An Interview With Mark Nepo". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 13, 2013.

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• Here I am: a Russian-speaking Jew living in Canada, and you, an Indian ex-patriot living in San Francisco. All of a sudden we commune in this moment about a much older Russian political dissident.That's the human part of being human: feeling those moments.

  David Bezmozgis

  San Francisco, Here I Am, Political

  The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 23, 2014.

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• I had to learn that there is more to the human being than material comfort, more than success, more even than national spirit or patriotism. That in any being worthy of being human there is also a demand for justice, for liberty, and that justice needs the evidence of all our lives, liberty is one and indivisible and collective, and no one can talk of justice solely for expediency's sake, nor of liberty while human beings, anywhere else on earth, are still in bondage.

  Han Suyin

  Freedom, Justice, Liberty

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