Quotes About Humanity

He remembered more of being human than the humans did.

How can I refuse an offer like that? We are all we have. And we are so small, and the night is so large.

Humans were interesting to Nova, and perhaps the most interesting things about them was their contradictions-so fragile and so tenuous.

How odd it is that a small, frail, temporary person like yourself should make me feel so clearly seen.

Exalt humans were more robust than Mean ones, but they were still human.

You can turn off sex, and you can turn off romantic love-but it's really hard to turn off all the human emotional responses to a powerful individual without also turning off your humanity.

God protect the halt and the lame," he muttered. "Also the purblind fools. And one Kit Marlowe, wherever he may be.

People are so complicated.

Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.

Why is your species so full of horrible ideas?

Humans have their hearts. Humans have their souls. And look at the abominations they achieve.

To the sagging wharf few ships could come. The population numbered two giants, an idiot, a dwarf.

How had I come to be herelike them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?

It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned. So, she shrank from that specious mystery the individual throws about himself, from Anna's smiles, from Lilian's tomorrows, from the shut-in room, the turned-in heart.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

She said most people were good on the inside, where it mattered. You have to give them a chance to show their goodness, she used to say. Some people need more time, that's all.

People wanted to be redeemed, she thought. Everyone did. We're only human.

The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.

because there are no winners in this sorry state of affairs. We are all losers; we are all diminished.

Good people were also capable of doing very bad things.

A propósito de ello escribió Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: «Cada hombre tiene algún pesar secreto, el cual el mundo no conoce; y a menudo tildamos a un hombre de frío cuando tan sólo está triste».

The war had made everyone a liar, thought Milan bitterly. The war had made it so that one could not distinguish at all between what was true and what false, between victims and perpetrators, or between perpetrators and perpetrators, or victims and victims.

we all laugh and mourn and love and hate with the same breath of air in our lungs. We are guilty and innocent. There is only the difference of a hair between these.

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.