Human Life Quotes - Page 24

• How can we be such fools as to go on senselessly taking human life in this way? Why the women in every nation do not rise up and refuse to bring children into a world of this kind is beyond my understanding.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Children, Understanding, Goes On

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• As in walking it is your great care not to run your foot upon a nail, or to tread awry, and strain your leg; so let it be in all the affairs of human life, not to hurt your mind or offend your judgment. And this rule, if observed carefully in all your deportment, will be a mighty security to you in your undertakings.

  Epictetus

  Running, Hurt, Feet

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• The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Daughter, Children, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)”, p.1054, Delphi Classics

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• The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Appreciation, Intellectual, Criticism

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• Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point.

  Rebecca West

  Music, Tragedy, Sound

  Rebecca West (2010). “Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey”, p.171, Open Road Media

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• Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Disappointment, Events, Deities

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.42

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• I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Thinking, Magic

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• Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life.

  Isaac Watts

  Men, Mind, Lovely

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• Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Men, Firsts, Life Is

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.196, Hackett Publishing

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• How short is human life! the very breath
  Which frames my words accelerates my death.

  Hannah More

  Death, Humans, Breaths

  Hannah More (1827). “Sacred Drams: The Search After Happiness, A. Other Poems”, p.122

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• All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Fate, Political, Politics

  Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue (2008). “Collected stories and other writings”

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• If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.

  Stephen Hawking

  Long, Would Be, Generations

  "Return of the time lord". Interview With Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2005.

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• The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.

  Joseph Joubert

  Life, Age, Innocence

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven.

  Isaac Barrow

  Men, Heaven, Noble

  Isaac Barrow (1830). “The Works of Dr. Isaac Barrow”, p.369

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• Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Life, Artist, Giving

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.88, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Religious, Space, Diversity

  "Calming our fears" by Tariq Ramadan, www.theguardian.com. January 2, 2007.

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• The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Struggle, Fighting, Winning

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• Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Influence, Inventor, Heard

  Uses of the Past ch. 8 (1957)

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• I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.

  Mildred Fay Jefferson

  Order, Land, Perfect

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• Most of us continue to believe that those who show utter contempt for human life by committing remorseless, premeditated murder justly forfeit the right to their own life.

  Alex Kozinski

  Believe, Murder, Forfeit

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• Sympathy is the charm of human life.

  Grace Aguilar

  Inspirational, Charm, Humans

  Grace Aguilar (1858). “The Mother's Recompense: a Sequel to Home Influence”, p.65

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• I look at the human life like an experiment. Every new moment, every new experience, tragic or otherwise, is an opportunity to gain a more accurate perspective and helps lead me to clarity.

  Steve Gleason

  Opportunity, New Experiences, Perspective

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• Human life is created in God's image, and that makes it sacred.

  Colin S. Smith

  Sacred, Life Is, Humans

  Colin S. Smith (2016). “The 10 Greatest Struggles of Your Life: Finding Freedom in God's Commands”, p.67, Moody Publishers

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• The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth.... He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one ... Then how can he who has the magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all times and all existence, think much of human life He cannot. Or can such a one account death fearful No indeed.

  Plato

  Life, Lying, Mean

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• The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments.

  Peter Singer

  Views, Progress, Development

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