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Human Quotes

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Human Quotes

“Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything-- even pride.”

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Author:G.K Chesterson
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“The analogy I want to make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep this systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.”

HumanHumanities
Book:No Humans Involved
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“If the human experience is born of compassion” the Little Light says angrily, “why does the Great Light curse humanity to suffer in the most unspeakable ways? Why is there so much grief, pain, and tragedy in the world?” Ketu gives a sardonic smile. The questions are easy to answer, but difficult to fully comprehend. It is one thing to gain knowledge, and another to experience it and fully understand its true meaning.”

LifePhilosophyCompassionKnowledgeHumanAstrologyKetu
Book:The Little Light
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“We as manifest humans must come to terms -psychologically, cognitively, and ethically - with the hard fact of what it means to be human: One cannot have the cake of humanity without eating its consequences. Once we treat ourselves as a species of rights and entitlements, once we say what ought or ought not to be thought or done, the moment we distinguish the order of things and respons to it in accordance with what we think is right, however far from the truth it may be, we have committed ourselves to the impersonal order of reason to which sapiens belongs - an order that will expunge our manifest self-portrait. We have crossed the cognitive Rubicon. In committing to this impersonal order we must realize that what is manifestly human - us as we stand here, now - will be overcome by that very order. Reason is a game in which we are all fleeting players and from which we cannot defect, so let us play this game well by committing to its interests and its ramifications.”

HumanityHuman
Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“It is of course not the case that AGI research programs must wait for a thoroughgoing critique of the transcendental structure to be carried out via physics, cognitive science, theoretical computer science, or politics before they attempt to put forward an adequate model; the two ought to be understood as parallel and overlapping projects. In this schema, the program of the artificial realization of the human's cognitive-practical abilities coincides with the project of the fundamental alienations of the human subject, which is precisely the continuation and elaboration of the Copernican enlightenment, moving from a particular perspective or local frame to a perspective or experience that is no longer uniquely determined by a particular and contingently constituted transcendental structure. In the same vein, the project of artificial general intelligence, rather than championing singularity or some equally dubious conception of the technological saviour, becomes a natural extension of the human's process of self-discovery through which the last vestiges of essentialism are washed away. What remains after this process of retrospective reassessment and prospective revision may indeed - as Roden suggests - bear no resemblance to the manifest self-portrait of the human in which our experience of what it means to be human is anchored.”

HumanityHumanSelf Portrait
Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“Images of time as an endless flow that underlines the insignificance of the human and its paltry concerns turn out to be antihumanist veneers upon a subjectivist account of time which, far from breaking from the dogmas of humanism, reinforces a deeply conservative form of humanism. This is a humanism afllicted by a deep-seated transcendental blind spot that not only uncritically posits the local and contingent characteristics of egocentric human experience as the characteristics of reality, but it also deems this very anthropomorphic reality - whether under the rubric of preindividual singularities or ceaseless becoming - to be the horizon for overcoming human exceptionalism. Such metaphysical accounts of time champion an infinite which is more pure alterity than the suspension of the finite. As such, they must both leave the finite intact in order to maintain their alterity and debase the finite as that which does not matter in so far it is perishable. The so-called finite of such images of time is thought, mind, or the human. But the human as finite will be haunted by human pettiness and its associated limitations. It will be doomed to bear the marks of exactly that which it seeks to seek clear of.”

TimeHuman
Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’ In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances… and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

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Author:C.S. Lewis
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“You are allowed to live and feel the experience of grief. By giving yourself permission to experience grief emotions and letting grief move through you, you are allowing grief (and by extension, yourself) to show up how it wants to, not how society wishes it would. There is immense self-love in that. In allowing yourself permission to feel, you are allowing your- self to show up as a whole human being, not just the parts of a human that you (or society) consider to be “appropriate,” “pretty,” or “worthy.”

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Book:Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
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“But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery—that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and god's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.”

GodHuman
Book:The Power and the Glory
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“Humans like to consider everything as linear, when in reality everything is cyclic. They are obsessed with straight lines. Straight roads, straight houses, straight pieces of steel, glass, and timber. Straight cut diamonds. Let’s get straight to the point. Be straight with me. I am straight, not gay. And this is how they see their lives. A linear journey, along the road of life. That is where expressions such as Highway to Hell come from. But what about other expressions, such as the life cycle, the cycle of nature, and the weather cycle? Because of this obsession with straight lines, they view history and historical events, as existing way back along an imaginary path, one they are sure they are far away from. Like watching a fading wake from a ship. So when they look at the religious wars, for example, the Christians versus the Muslims, the rise and fall of Empires, democracies and dictatorships, they seem blind when comparing present day situations with those of the past. The majority of humans see evolution as a race along a straight race track, a race they are winning by a long margin, yet they are afraid to ever slow down, in case other life catches them. If they did slow down long enough, they may observe that the track is actually cyclic.”

HumansRealityHumanityHuman NatureEvolutionHumanLinearCycle Of LifeHuman Nature QuotesLife Cycle
Author:Robert Black
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“Intelligent, artistic, hard-working, well-mannered, educated, decent... good! Strong! Masculine! What else... Oh yes! Good-looking, sexy, experienced, exceptionally knowledgeable in bed, always fashionable, stylish, fragrant, flawless, faultless, I’m-just-perfect Alex! And me? I’m just like everyone else: a cocktail of virtues and shortcomings served with a couple of flaws. And that’s why this superhuman is starting to infuriate me. I desperately want to hurt his feelings or at least offend him in some way. This seems like an unhealthy reaction at first glance but is actually completely healthy, because next to people like him – if others like him even exist – you feel more awkward, more flawed, more stupid, and more subhuman than ever.”

Human
Book:Monogamy Book One. Lover
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