Quotessence
Home / Topics / Humans Quotes

Humans Quotes

Browse 32533 quotes about Humans.

Related topics

Humans Quotes

“Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels' wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again.”

“It is rewarding to find someone you like, but it is essential to like yourself. It is quickening to recognize that someone is a good and decent human being, but it is indispensable to view yourself as acceptable. It is a delight to discover people who are worthy of respect and admiration and love, but it is vital to believe yourself deserving of these things.”

“Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.”

“It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.”

“They are inherently good - the bad reactions aren't basic. Every human being is a child of God and has more good in him than evil - but circumstances and associates can step up the bad and reduce the good. I've got great faith in the essential fairness and decency - you may say goodness - of the human being.”

“Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.”

“The "environmental movement" is becoming an economic movement, is joining the social justice movement, is becoming a sustainability movement. It's leaving behind the "People's Needs versus Nature's Needs" conflict in favor of making the case for environmental health as the essential underpinning of prosperous and stable human civilization.”