Human Life Quotes - Page 11

• Dog love is not the special realm of childhood or of boyhood, no matter what the movies keep telling us. It is highly significant, I think, that at both ends of human life span the bond between human and dog speaks with an insistent clarity - if we have the ears to hear.

  Marjorie Garber

  Dog, Love Is, Thinking

  Marjorie Garber (1997). “DOG LOVE”, Touchstone

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• The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the I out of the experience...
  Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate I or mind can be found .... [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

  Alan Watts

  Pain, Real, Lying

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• Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.

  Lewis Mumford

  Wisdom, Men, Civilization

  "Faith for Living". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1940.

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• Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away: enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what to-morrow may produce.

  Horace

  May, Too Much, Fly Away

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• It is not a question of patronizing philanthropy towards disabled people. They do not need the patronage of the non-disabled. It is not for them to adapt to the dominant and dominating world of the so-called non-disabled. It is for us to adapt our understanding of a common humanity; to learn of the richness of how human life is diverse; to recognize the presence of disability in our human midst as an enrichment of our diversity.

  Nelson Mandela

  Common Humanity, Diversity, People

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• Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life.

  Coretta Scott King

  Justice, Death Penalty, Humans

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• The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

  Aldous Huxley

  Life, Routine, Natural

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Humanity, Church, Needs

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• If we as a society are willing to take away human life, we should be willing to watch it.

  Alex Kozinski

  Watches, Should, Willing

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

  Pliny the Elder

  Death, Sovereign, Humans

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• Of those that spin out trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinions of their own importance, and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.

  Samuel Johnson

  Memorial, Opinion, Improvement

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

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• A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

  Matthew Woodring Stover

  Pursuit Of Happiness, Rights, Civilization

  Matthew Woodring Stover (2008). “Blade of Tyshalle”, p.102, Del Rey

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• In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Order, Unity, Body

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Technology, Race, Giving

  "John von Neumann, 1903-1957". "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society" 64, no.3, part 2, May, 1958.

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• I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

  Caitlin Moran

  Pain, War, Believe

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• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

  A. R. Ammons

  Art, Mean, Self

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

  Thomas Nagel

  Occupation, Life Is, Intense

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mortal Questions”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt.

  Thomas Ligotti

  Hurt, Things Will Get Better, Needs

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• Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

  Yukio Mishima

  Forever, Life Is, Humans

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• I am no longer the wave of consciousness thinking itself separated from the sea of cosmic consciousness. I am the ocean of Spirit that has become the wave of human life.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Ocean, Thinking, Sea

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• Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.

  Joseph Henry

  Infinite, Pity, Pathos

  "John Inglesant". Book by Joseph Henry Shorthouse, 1881.

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• You remember all those phrases about how these people - Asians - dont value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

  Neil Sheehan

  Children, People, Phrases

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• This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.

  Anne Lamott

  Easter, Sisterhood, Brotherhood

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• I believe strongly and sincerely that with the deep-rooted wisdom and dignity, the innate respect for human lives, the intense humanity that is our heritage, the African race, united under one federal government, will emerge not as just another world bloc to flaunt its wealth and strength, but as a Great Power whose greatness is indestructible because it is built not on fear, envy and suspicion, nor won at the expense of others, but founded on hope, trust, friendship and directed to the good of all mankind.

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Believe, Greatness, Race

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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