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Human Beings Quotes

Browse 7550 quotes about Human Beings.

Human Beings Quotes

“Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.”

Thinking Humans Has Beens Facts Sides Human Beings Emotion Century Keys Elements Intellectual Aspect Tragic Being Human 20th Century Aspects Of Life

Author:Bill Viola

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

Humans Age Three Human Beings Majors Intellectual Mathematics Chess Pursuit Feats Puberty

Book:George Steiner: A Reader

Source: George Steiner: A Reader

“The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.”

World Humans Facts Desire Human Beings Forever Achieve Emotional Despair Intellectual Perfection Species Strive Denial Imperfection Doomed Saddest Ardent

Book:Dark Rivers of the Heart: A Novel

Source: Dark Rivers of the Heart: A Novel

“[What I want to communicate] doesn't have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts - understanding. But I don't really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It's not my information, it's not mine. I didn't make it. I just discovered it.”

People Knows World Want Needs Humans I Can Self Language Understanding Human Beings Information Emotional Mines Majors Messages Intellectual Communicate Being Human Evident Emotional Things

Author:Jeff Buckley

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?”

“When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.”

Knows Feels Humans Ideas Reason Able Certain Lost Realizing Human Beings Forever Ought Mets Intellectual Relation Flesh Circles Labour Brutality Human Relations Dukes Caricatures

Author:George Orwell

“I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.”

“Human life is so strangely constituted that even perfected intellectual understanding combined with the richest experience is incapable of conquering innate weaknesses. Even if it thoroughly analyzes itself, psychology (and this is one of the dubious aspects of psychoanalysis) can, to be sure, recognize its flawed native characteristics, but it cannot eliminate them. Understanding (them) is not the same as overcoming (them) and, again and again, we see the wisest of human beings helpless in the fact of their small follies which everyone else observes with a smile.”

“The deepest insult which can be shown to a human being is to associate it solely with material functions, with no cognizance and no consideration of its intellectual and spiritual power.”

Humans Spiritual Human Beings Materials Intellectual Function Insult Consideration Associates Spiritual Power

Author:Mary C. Ames

“While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings-upon the spirit that animates mankind.”

Humans Seems Spirit Human Beings Quality Moral Mankind Expression Depends Civilization Intellectual Instruments Agency Visible

Author:Mary Ritter Beard

“It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.”

Humans War Suffering Dies Loses Religious Human Beings Moral Alive Atheism Terrible Intellectual Resources Hatred Delusion Scarce Diversion Religious Wars Scarce Resources Religious Hatred

Author:Sam Harris

“One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns-about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.”

Source: Letter to a Christian Nation