Quotes About Human Condition
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
―William Shakespeare, As You Like It
“Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”
―O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
―David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
―Noam Chomsky
“Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.”
―José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
―Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
―Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
“Humanity is lost because people have abandoned using their conscience as their compass.”
―Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
“If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.”
―Robert Wright
“There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.”
―Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. ”
―José Ortega y Gasset
“Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons.Morality, not corruption.Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance.Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate.Convergence, not segregation.Tolerance, not discrimination.Fairness, not hypocrisy.Substance, not superficiality.Character, not immaturity.Transparency, not secrecy.Justice, not lawlessness.Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.”
―Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem