Human Existence Quotes - Page 8

• There are certainly people for whom politics is not a category that helps you understand human existence. In fact, it's kind of a detour into superficiality, and although I disagree with those people, I don't think it's the case that everyone who writes has to write politically or has to write in opposition to the really horrendous things that are going on on a political level in the world today. There are some writers who simply aren't any good at that and really should stay away from it.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One of the best practices in the manual of human existence is to assist people who need help when you can safely do so. The best people help those who need help.

  Sara Benincasa

  People, Helping, Existence

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

  David E. Cooper

  Plato, Reality, Light

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think communities of faith are extremely important in this question. I think that all faith communities share a common and unusual distinction in our time of being the only institutions left that can posit some goal other than accumulation for human existence. I think that's enormously important because it is that drive for consumption more than anything else that fuels the environmental devastation around us.

  Bill McKibben

  Thinking, Goal, Community

  Source: theotherjournal.com

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• I love Dr. Evil [from Austin Powers] as a walking, talking, narcissistic manifestation of everything screwed up about human existence - his desire to take over the world, and have the world reflect his own power lust.

  Jay Roach

  Talking, Evil, Lust

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

  Michel Foucault

  Ideas, Space, People

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

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• This era in human existence where so much information is out there, it's easy for someone like Donald Trump to use that to make his claim that information is fake news. And there are people who think 'I guess we should believe the President when he says it's fake news.'

  Greg Graffin

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• To be known by God is the highest goal of human existence.

  R. C. Sproul

  Goal, Existence, Humans

  Twitter post from Nov 13, 2016

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• Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Character, Historical Knowledge, Objectivity

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• The sabbath is God's special present to the working man, and one of its chief objects is to prolong his life, and preserve efficient his working tone. The savings bank of human existence is the weekly sabbath.

  William Blaikie

  Men, Special, Saving

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• Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.

  Akira Kurosawa

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• Sin is not only manifested in certain acts that are forbidden by divine command. Sin also appears in attitudes and dispositions and feelings. Lust and hate are sins as well as adultery and murder. And, in the traditional Christian view, despair and chronic boredom - unaccompanied by any vicious act - are serious sins. They are expressions of man's separation from God, as the ultimate good, meaning, and end of human existence.

  Mortimer Adler

  Christian, Attitude, Hate

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• Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence.

  Norman Cousins

  Lying, Tragedy, Needs

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• Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still themost important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.

  Elias Canetti

  Heart, Law, Justice

  Elias Canetti (1962). “Crowds and power: Masse und Macht]”

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• The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac represents the twelve lessons of human existence, the 12 qualities to be developed in the formation of the perfect man (and woman).

  Vera Stanley Alder

  Men, Zodiac, Perfect

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• If man did not exist as a world-spanning receptive realm of perception, if he were not engaged in this capacity, nothing at all could exist. 'Being,' in its traditional usage, means 'presence' and 'persistence.' To achieve presence, and thereby being, an entity requires some sort of open realm in which presence and persistence can take place. Thus an open realm of perception like that of human existence is the one being that makes being possible.

  Medard Boss

  Mean, Persistence, Men

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• I admit there’s an element of brutality in all my work - it’s part of the truth about human existence I always want to explore - but the last thing I’m trying to do is put on some kind of freak show, inviting people to get off on other people’s pain and humiliation.

  Todd Solondz

  Pain, People, Trying

  Interview with Sigrid Nunez, www.believermag.com. February 2005.

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• I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.

  Mark Twain

  Humanity, Tragedy, Wonderful

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• For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

  Milan Kundera

  Novelists, Historic, Given

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• To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

  N. Scott Momaday

  Space, Forever, Devil

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• And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.

  Jane Yolen

  Hate, Book, Fire

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• As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
  Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
  The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

  Carl Jung

  Dream, Heart, Night

  Memories, Dreams, Reflections ch. 11 (1962)

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• We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings-animals and plants-are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory because they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Da-sein (literally being-the-there)... Man as man is present... in a manner wholly different from... inanimate things.

  Medard Boss

  Animal, Reality, Men

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• There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

  Milan Kundera

  Philosophy, Problem, Metaphysical

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• Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

  James G. Frazer

  Buddhism, Blow, Roots

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