#human

Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former. ↗

— Matthew Gregory Lewis

#contentment #discontentment #hermit #hermits #hopelessness

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. ↗

— William Blake

#energy #existence #hate #human #human existence

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. ↗

— Gene Roddenberry

#blames #creates #faulty #god #having

How frail the human heart must be -- a mirrored pool of thought. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#human-heart #thought #journalism

... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection. ↗

— Gretchen Rubin

#focus #god #humanity #mistakes #perfection

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#being #desire #evolution #human #yearning

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other. ↗

— Meryl Streep

#humanity #connection

We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought. ↗

— Kathryn Stockett

#people #race-relations #separation

A bitter experience makes us a better person. ↗

— Saru Singhal

#experience #human-being #life #experience

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#fulfillment #humankind #potential #marketing