#human

Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk - lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say O.K. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud? ↗

— Maira Kalman

#humanity #life #struggle #life

I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness. ↗

— Vasily Grossman

#human-kindness #philosophical #ussr #life

I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way. ↗

— John Marsden

#life #life

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? ↗

— Charles Darwin

#darwinism #evolution #human-mind #macro-evolution #macroevolution

We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed ↗

— Thomas Gilovich

#logic #mind #psychology #life

People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#humanism #life

And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#endeavors #greed #humanity #ladder #learning

Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#religion #revolution #freedom

The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simple because the person living it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human. ↗

— Rachel Joyce

#life

If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself. ↗

— John Gray

#humanity #humans #life #man #straw-dogs