Quotes About Human

No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form -- words -- to the ineffable.

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'.

the desert, nobody needed to preach that there was a higher power than the human. Whether you think of it as natural or supernatural—and in the sixth century there was no difference between the two—anyone unaware of it did not survive.

Yet everywhere he looked, what should surely bring people together only seemed to drive them apart. The more they preached what the prophets had said from Moses down through Jesus, the less they seemed to hear those same prophets' words. How could the idea of divine unity result in such human disunity?

It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.

The Agnostic is one who asserts 'what no one denies' that there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence.

Spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.

The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.

But if the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human being will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower. It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust.

Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.

The modern antithesis of observation and reason on the one hand versus revelation and faith on the other is only tenable on the basis of a prior decision that the whole cosmic and human story has no purpose and therefore no meaning. It

At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd.

Cannibalism and slavery are probably the oldest manifestations of human predation and submission. Although both are now discouraged, their continued existence in psychological forms demonstrates that civilization has achieved great success in moving from the concrete and physical to the abstract and psychological, while persisting in the same purposes.

All of human literature could just be a user's guide to the multiverse!

a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-ins, but they seemed human to her.

She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.

That night the most amazing thing happened: the stars came down from out of the sky. They weren't used to seeing human beings, so they weren't afraid. They were like tame birds—they were all around me, a few feet off the ground, each one about the size of a softball. Spiky, and a little warm, and they sort of squeaked. You could hold them.

Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.

Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.

Conservatism is primarily based on a proper recognition of human limitations, and cannot be argued in a spirit of self-glorifying logic.

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.