Human Condition Quotes - Page 4

• Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.

  Che Guevara

  Men, Commodity, Selling

  "Dictator lit: Castro's clunking Che memoir", www.theguardian.com. March 22, 2012.

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• I don't wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of Utopia. But I think many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition.

  Hans Magnus Enzensberger

  Thinking, Names, Mind

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• Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human conditions which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Believe, Expression, Order

  Rudolf Rocker (2004). “Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice”, p.15, AK Press

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• May the work of your hands be a sign of gratitude and reverence to the human condition.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Gratitude, Hands, May

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• The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.

  E. O. Wilson

  Loss, Science, Intellectual

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• Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

  Tucker Max

  Art, Entertainment, Mediums

  Interview with Jeremy Berger, www.askmen.com.

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• We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross

  Paul Tournier

  Doubt, Suffering, Mystery

  Paul Tournier (1982). “Reflections: a personal guide for life's most crucial questions”, Westminster John Knox Press

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• The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.

  Frank Herbert

  Future, Journey, Desire

  Frank Herbert (2008). “Children of Dune”, p.311, Penguin

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• in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

  Hannah Arendt

  Character, Men, Self

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• The human condition: lost in thought.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Lost, Humans

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “Stillness Speaks”, p.13, New World Library

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• Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego's subterfuges?

  Roméo Dallaire

  Struggle, Ego, Subterfuge

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• Let us remember with humility the loneliness of being man in a universe we do not understand and the vulnerability of the human condition. The animals could do very well without us, but we cannot do without them.

  Gerald Carson

  Nature, Loneliness, Humility

  Gerald Carson (1972). “Men, beasts, and gods: a history of cruelty and kindness to animals”

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• I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

  August Wilson

  Believe, Reality, Theatre

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• A journal is more than a memory goad. It's therapeutic. The simple act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential though patterms that best defines us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us.

  Randy Wayne White

  Notebook, Memories, Simple

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• I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.

  Maya Angelou

  Fall, Talking, America

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• The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved.

  George Dzundza

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

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• Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

  Arthur Koestler

  Lying, Fate, Technology

  1953 'The Boredomof Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.

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• They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
  The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

  John Ralston Saul

  Children, Men, Voice

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• The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment.

  Gene Kelly

  Light, Musical, Looks

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• We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.

  Frantz Fanon

  Believe, Assuming, Individual

  Frantz Fanon (2008). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.14, Grove Press

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• What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.

  Caitlin Moran

  Depressing, Art, Mean

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• (...)how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.

  Christopher McCandless

  Strong, Hands, Finding Yourself

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• Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

  Octavio Paz

  Men, Solitude, Saying No

  The Labyrinth of Solitude ch. 9 (1950) (translation by Lysander Kemp)

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• Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy

  Harlan Coben

  Dream, Crazy, Thinking

  "Six Years". Book by Harlan Coben, 2013.

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• The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

  Hermann Hesse

  Music, Attitude, Destiny

  "The Glass Bead Game". Book by Hermann Hesse, 1943.

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