Quotes About Human

By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more "natural" than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.

It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes an interesting side branch.

There are seasons, in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when… to dare is the highest wisdom.

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

For the mind of every man is balanced upon the creative tension within him of conceptual mediation between the opposed polarities of the finite and the infinite, the essential and the existential. the exact equation between them is responsible for the basic human types, which, in aesthetics, constitute the classical and the romantic temperaments.

I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

Our disposition toward the ills which our fellow-man inflicts on us through malice or meddling is quite different from our disposition toward the ills which are inherent in the conditions of human life.

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.

In the end, it comes down, as it always comes down, to each individual human being doing what he—or she—must to live with himself/herself.

loneliness is endemic to the human condition, and it is more intense in our society, where we are taught to call our loneliness "freedom of the individual.

really believed what he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties . . . but right through every human heart" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973]).

The world is not going into concentric blocs of power. It is actually going into a diffusion of power with more centres of decision-making than ever in human civilisation. That requires you to place yourself in far more hubs of power than ever before.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"]

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.

Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.

Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.