Quotes About Humanity

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

and he can feel his heart going out into the world...

Capii che gli ubriachi e gli storpi vengono trascinati fuori dall'arena come Cristi disossati, un uomo sotto ogni braccio, coi piedi che strisciano a terra, gli occhi al cielo.

Cuando la noche anterior Lenore Beadsman lloró frente a Andrew Sealander Lang fue la primera vez en su vida que había llorado frente a alguien. Rick Vigorous había llorado frente a montones de personas.

They Can Kill You, But The Legalities Of Eating You Are Quite A Bit Dicier

there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

X secretly castigates himself and wonder where his basic decency and compassion are.

David Foster Wallace

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.'s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow.

think of the condition of Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by thousands, but by millions; each one of whom as he struck his enemy wounded horribly some other innocent heart far away.

Abraham Lincoln, the closing lines of his first inaugural. It was an appeal for peace; he prayed that all of us would finally be moved by 'the better angels of our nature.

A thermonuclear bomb hitting it directly would have been more humane.

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.

But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.

I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!

There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good.

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

There is no real freedom for the man who is in so much of a hurry that he is annoyed by the human race and by the hot glaring afternoon sun.