Human Life Quotes - Page 7

• If, in my retirement to the humble station of a private citizen, I am accompanied with the esteem and approbation of my fellow citizens, trophies obtained by the bloodstained steel, or the tattered flags of the tented field, will never be envied. The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Retirement, Humble, Government

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

  Erich Fromm

  Religious, Animal, Men

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics”, p.46, Routledge

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• There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor.

  Washington Irving

  Character, Play, Comedy

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Plays, Historical Works, Poetry and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated): The Entire Opus of the Prolific American Writer, Biographer and Historian, Including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Bracebridge Hall and many more”, p.610, e-artnow

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• ... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.

  Bertrand Russell

  Pain, Loneliness, World

  Bertrand Russell (2014). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell”, p.9, Routledge

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• The best aphorisms are.... portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Feelings, Intellectual, Weak Points

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• It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

  David Whyte

  Loss, Thinking, Might

  "The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times" by David Whyte, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• To joy in conquest is to joy in the loss of human life.

  Laozi

  Loss, Joy, Conquest

  Laozi, Sepharial (1904). “The Book of the Simple Way of Laotze: A New Translation from the Text of the Tao-teh-king”

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• Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
  A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
  See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
  Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
  With light upon him from his father's eyes!
  See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
  Some fragment from his dream of human life,
  Shaped by himself with newly-learned art.

  William Wordsworth

  Mother, Dream, Art

  William Wordsworth (1837). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...”, p.388

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• The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Men, Self, Complacency

  "The Revolt of the Masses". Book by José Ortega y Gasset. Chapter XI: "The Self-Satisfied Age", 1929.

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• The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

  W. H. Auden

  Sex, Heart, Men

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• Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune - what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Destiny, Tragedy, Different

  "Feeling and Form". Book by Susanne Katherina Langer, ch. 19, 1953.

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• Men honor property above all else; it has the greatest power in human life.

  Euripides

  Men, Honor, Humans

  Euripides (2013). “Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes”, p.117, University of Chicago Press

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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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• The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

  Adrienne Rich

  Ocean, Moon, Monsters

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• The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Religious, Pain, Optimism

  Science and the ModernWorld ch. 12 (1925)

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• The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

  Simone Weil

  Morning, War, Eight

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• The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.

  Paul Tillich

  Character, Evil, Creative

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• Human life is too difficult for people.

  Paul Engle

  People, Life Is, Difficult

  Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.160, University of Iowa Press

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• Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.

  Irving Stone

  Life, Patterns, Conclusion

  Irving Stone (1984). “Lust for Life”, Plume

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• Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

  Simone Weil

  Sacrifice, Balance, Looks

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• To live a very long time... is supposed to be the desired object of all human life. But it is not. The main thing is to ride the flood tide... How glorious it is to create! For those few moments of a lifetime when the stream is running full and deep: those are the justification for everything.

  James Dickey

  Life, Running, Long

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• The discovery of magic can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without either hesitation or arrogance. Then magic can descend onto our existence.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Discovery, Bravery, Arrogance

  Chogyam Trungpa (2010). “The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Eight: Great Eastern Sun; Shambhala; Selected Writings”, p.107, Shambhala Publications

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• We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that are now threatening human life and much of the rest of life on earth. Our crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of decision of policy and action.

  George Wald

  Rest Of Life, Decision, Earth

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• We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.

  Northrop Frye

  Writing, Looks, Use

  Northrop Frye (1964). “The Educated Imagination”, p.56, Indiana University Press

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• It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

  Alain de Botton

  Life, Dust, Space

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