All Quotes By Tag: Human-nature

“He had been dazzled. Because of the dazzling brightness, he had had to kill [Seigen]. All who had encountered Seigen had had their hearts stolen by that brightness. That envy had turned to malice.”

“Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.”

“Our imperfection is the perfect experience of being human.”

“We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.”

“Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.”

“All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

“I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

“We would do well, as Orwell counselled, to see the traces of the dystopian around us, to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are; the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination, never really change. We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups. What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, a dedication to ‘common decency’ and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.”

“After 44 years of marriage, isn’t it amazing when you can look at your partner sound asleep next to you and still believe they have potential.”

“The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.”

“Sin embargo, conocí a muchos internados que supieron ser fieles a su dignidad humana hasta el mismo fin. Los nazis lograron degradarlos físicamente, pero no fueron capaces de rebajarlos moralmente.Gracias a estos pocos, no he perdido totalmente mi fe en la humanidad. Si en la misma jungla de Birkenau no todos fueron necesariamente inhumanos con sus hermanos hombres, indudablemente hay todavía esperanzas.Esta esperanza es la que me hace vivir.”

“If you don’t write when you don’t have time for it, you won’t write when you do have time for it.”

“The purpose of the gospel is to make bad men good and good men better, and to change human nature.”

“This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.”

“There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.”