Human Condition Quotes - Page 13

• Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Use, Harm, Function

  "Mist". Book by Miguel de Unamuno, 1914.

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• Good families are generally worse than any others.

  Anthony Hope

  Good Family

  Anthony Hope (2016). “The Prisoner of Zenda”, p.4, Xist Publishing

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• I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

  Penelope Keith

  Typical, Television, Used

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• In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.

  William A. Dembski

  Jesus, Becoming, Christ

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• I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

  Jonathan Frakes

  Baseball, Writing, Literature

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• Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things.

  Rene Dubos

  Adventure, Character, Unique

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• Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

  George Eliot

  Passion, Men, Games

  "Felix Holt, the Radical". Book by George Eliot. Chapter 29, 1866.

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• I think that laziness in many ways is the human condition, and that's what has led us to this place where, as we've developed technology.

  Nick Offerman

  Technology, Thinking, Laziness

  "Nick Offerman on Parks And Recreation and his comically oversized penis". Interview with Sean O'Neal, www.avclub.com. July 18, 2012.

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• I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Law, Keys

  Steven Pinker (2007). “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature”, p.282, Penguin

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• Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

  Steven Rinella

  Art, Hate, Hunting

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• When Goethe says that in every human condition foes lie in wait for us, "invincible only by cheerfulness and equanimity," he does not mean that we can at all times be really cheerful, or at a moment's notice; but that the endeavor to look at the better side of things will produce the habit, and that this habit is the surest safeguard against the danger of sudden evils.

  Leigh Hunt

  Lying, Mean, Evil

  Leigh Hunt (1851). “Table-talk: To which are added Imaginary conversations of Pope and Swift”, p.37, Smith, Elder

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• The dialogue about sustainability is about a change in the human trajectory that will require us to rethink old assumptions and engage the large questions of the human condition that some presume to have been solved once and for all.

  David W. Orr

  Environmental, Assumption, Sustainability

  David W. Orr (2012). “The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror”, p.58, Island Press

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• If a man hasn't found anything worth dying for, he hasn't anything worth living for.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Dying, Found

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• In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Age, Judgment, Identical

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• If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished, if the crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded, men would hardly feel the pity of things. The beauty of life is in its impermanence. Man lives the longest of all living things... and even one year lived peacefully seems very long. Yet for such as love the world, a thousand years would fade like the dream of one night.

  Yoshida Kenko

  Dream, Night, Men

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• The sympathies of a well-adjusted person can easily be aroused by the plight of strangers. Indeed, the skillful writer of a novel, a play, or an opera can engage our emotions on behalf of people who are not only strangers to us, but who do not even exist! And a person whose emotions cannot be so aroused is not behaving normally.

  John Derbyshire

  Play, People, Plight

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• If you dropped me off a space platform onto the ground where a line was drawn, I would fall to the left side of it. I believe the difference between right and left is that the right, for the most part, the bulk of their philosophy is interested in property, and the rights of people to own property and gain and acquire and keep property. And I think on the left - though they blend and mix - on the left primarily you will find people who are more concerned about humans, and the human condition, and what can be done.

  George Carlin

  Philosophy, Believe, Fall

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Religion to me is when man gets ahold of spirituality: "My god is right, yours is wrong." Religion to me is the human condition. "If you're a Muslim, you can't be a Christian." That to me is religion.

  Denzel Washington

  Christian, Men, Spirituality

  Source: the-talks.com

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• I realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe.

  Moby

  Teaching, Believe, Years

  "Exclusive Premiere of Moby’s New Video, 'The Last Day'". Interview with Jaeah Lee, www.motherjones.com. September 2, 2014.

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• If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.

  Douglas Adams

  Thinking, Giving, Fundamentals

  Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry (2012). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.127, Pan Macmillan

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• I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

  Tim Schafer

  Years, People, Support

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• In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

  Roger Ebert

  Kids, Games, Track

  Roger Ebert (2006). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007”, p.801, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, But Hating, my boy, is an Art.

  Ogden Nash

  Art, Hate, School

  'Plea for Less Malice Toward None' (1933)

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• I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.

  Peter Ustinov

  Jesus, Believe, Two

  Nicholas Fraser, Kate Caffrey, Peter Ustinov, Carl Sagan, Eric Sevareid (1978). “Aristotle Onassis”

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• The human condition is better improved by altering detrimental circumstances and personal perspectives than by trying to alter personal outlooks, while ignoring the very circumstances that serve to nourish them

  Albert Bandura

  Perspective, Trying, Outlook

  Albert Bandura (1986). “Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory”, Prentice Hall

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