Quotes About Humanity

It's more important to understand people than to forgive them.

And today, to the best of his knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on the belief that slavery had ceased to exist.

In Campo San Casiano, because he felt no need to hurry, he decided to have a look at the Tintoretto Crucifixion. Brunetti had always been struck by how bored this Christ looked, stuck artfully up there on his cross, posed in front of the hedge of perpendicular spears that divided the painting in half. Christ seemed finally to have come to accept the truth of those warnings that all this business about becoming human would come to no good; He seemed eager to get back to the job of being God.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.

Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming

The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.

Boris shrugged. "Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

Nihil sub sole novum

I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers.

I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:

Dr. Klaus Mampell from Germany reportedly said that he didn't see any more reason for seeing us (the human race) connected with apes than with canary birds or kangaroos.

He sins because he is a sinner. Fundamentally, on the inside, man is a sinner, and that accounts for his actions. I am sure that many people in that day said of the Assyrians,

Your species. You have a terrific capacity for effing things up. For hurting one another. For making the world a worse place. But then you invent something like ice cream. That makes up for a lot. Makes you worth rooting for.

Everyone believes there are horrible people doing horrible things; things we would never, ever do. But we do those same horrible things. There is no us and them. Only we.

If literature is humanity at its absolute best, striving after the hard truths, straining to shed the egos that cripple nonliterary relationships, then books, the actual objects of books, are the physical expressions of the struggle to craft a better humanity. Entering the culture of books, even the culture of a single book--and every book is the culture of its audience--makes the world feel a little better, a little more true and welcoming.

The heart of man is the same in every age. The spiritual medicine which it requires is always the same.

The Bible alone gives a true and faithful account of man. It does not flatter him as novels and romances do; it does not conceal his faults and exaggerate his goodness, it paints him just as he is.

Let us, then, have it settled in our minds that the sinfulness of man does not begin from without, but from within. It is not the result of bad training in early years. It is not picked up from bad companions and bad examples, as some weak Christians are too fond of saying. No! It is a family disease that we all inherit from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and with which we are born.

Pero todavía no he visto que haya algún pasaje en las Escrituras que enseñe que puede lograrse una perfección literal, una liberación completa y absoluta del pecado, ni en los pensamientos, ni palabras ni hechos, ni tampoco que ningún hijo de Adán lo haya logrado en este mundo.

God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.

If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame. His salvation was that he lived in denial.