Quotes About Humanity

Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.

We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified.

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.

All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.

Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff.

Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep

The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole.

Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.

My true religion is kindness. That is a great moral position - practicing kindness, keeping one's heart open in the presence of suffering.

Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, 'Not for me, baby.

Love and goodness and the world's beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.

The facts of this world will never satisfy the human heart, but what we give each other can, when it holds love.

I want to hear someone remind me that if I want to have loving feelings, I need to do loving things. I want someone to make me laugh about our shared humanity and cuckooness; I want someone to remind me that laughter is carbonated holiness.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul

Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside? Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent.

Besides, those few people who aren't a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.