Quotes About Human

Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.*

humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger.

People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending eighteen hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis.

Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human.

We" are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other

Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal word of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought.

Observing certain types of behavior which they believed to be characteristic of the human species, instinct theorists decided that the causes of such behavior are innate, unchosen, and unlearned tendencies which drive man to act as he does.

We should not sacrifice self to others nor others to self; we should discard the idea of human sacrifice as a moral ideal. Relationships based on an exchange of values are superior to those based on the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

Life, for a human being, is a constant process of thought, of motion, of purpose, of achievement; it is not the state of merely not being dead.

The fact that we live among other human beings should not obscure the intimately personal nature of our need for a code of ethics. Our self-esteem requires it, our happiness requires it, our life requires it.

Thus, psychology, as it pertains to man, is properly conceived and defined as the science that studies the attributes and characteristics which man possesses by virtue of his rational faculty.

The psychologist, seeking to understand the principles of human behavior, observes (a) that man, as a biological entity, possesses various needs, and (b) that man characteristically acts to achieve various ends or goals.

Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.

Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice.

Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

Una strana fatalità sembra costringere ogni essere umano ad aggirarsi, simile ad un fantasma, nei luoghi dove qualche grave avvenimento ha lasciato un profondo solco nella vita di lui; e codesta fatalità è tanto più inesorabile, quanto più quel solco sia di tristezza e di dolore.

The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.

Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may die other human souls!

The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child.

Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul.

It is the credit of human nature that, except in the case where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

The gloomy and desolate old house, deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude, was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.