Quotes About Humanity

We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life – our own life and all that life means to us – and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.

I have always found that hell is other people.

While it shows the gods as no better than the rest of us, she said, at least, it shows them as no worse. See here the sources of human morality.

My mother and my mother's mother were born in a place where time does not run as in Amber. I am the first of my mother's line to bear all the marks of humanity.

I am a man who occasionally aspires to things beyond the belly and the phallus. I am not the saint the Buddhists think me to be, and I am not the hero out of legend. I am a man who knows much fear, and who occasionally feels guilt.

Make up your mind, yaar, choose one thing.' 'How can I? I'm just a human being,' he replied

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories - your life, my life, old Husain's life, they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.

When a culture vansihes, humanity is the loser.

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories – your life, my life, old Husain's life, they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.

When a culture vanishes, humanity is the loser.

You know, Maneck, the human face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no room for crying.' 'What a nice saying,' he answered

He placed his hand over his heart. In here, there is limitless room - happiness, kindness, sorrow, anger, friendship - everything fits in here.

Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all.

Ishvar left the trunk he was packing on the verandah, and came in. He sat on the bed, putting his around him. You know, Maneck, the human face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no room for crying.

Rohinton Mistry

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.

If only we could put our minds in plaster casts like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking from speaking; no director is there to interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself, someone to shout *Cut!* Volubility is a specifically human misery; I am language mad; no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but...I go on talking

We're a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.

Nationality was the most pernicious, depersonalizing, homogenizing label that could ever be attached to the human individual.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

regarding Charles Lee) This eccentric and notably slovenly man was always trailed by his beloved dogs. When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs, he once explained, I shall transfer my benevolence to them.