#human

The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful. ↗

— Olaf Stapledon

#man #beauty

A Muslim must not hate his wife and if he be displeased with one bad quality in her, then let him be pleased with another that is good. ↗

— Anonymous

#equality #good #goodness #greatest #humanity

Through the window, I saw the beautiful world outside: the sky, the sun, the cacti, the rocks, and the dirt. How I longed to return to it! I licked at the air, trying to smell the desert's delicious dusty scent, but could not. How was I able to see it without smelling it? Did humans control scents as well as the temperature and the waters? Is that what windows were for, to keep out scents? Why did they wish to put invisible barriers between themselves and the world? ↗

— Patrick Jennings

#scent #scents #snakes #wild #windows

I like two beautiful women on my arm- as human shields"
 ↗

— Josh Stern

#beauty

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #earth #french-riviera #humans #ivory-coast

It struck me that the beauty we attribute to children isn’t something they have that we don’t. It's something they do, which we have long since stopped doing—just describing things as we see them, the simple, unadorned facts. ↗

— Christina Carson

#family #native #solving-human-dilemmas #beauty

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision. ↗

— Vanessa Veselka

#humanity #terror #beauty

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#pain #beauty

[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea. ↗

— Carl Sagan as Ellie Arroway

#space-and-cosmos #wonder #beauty

Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep - but an intruder came, now, that would not "down". It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came [...] So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep. ↗

— Mark Twain

#childhood #conscience #human-nature #humanity #sleep