#humanit

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#nature-inspirational #inspirational

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850) ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#humanity #life #mankind #life

The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God. ↗

— Saint Irenaeus

#glory #god #humanity #life #life

All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing “Come All Ye Faithful” like mad. Big deal. It’s supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can’t see anything religious or pretty, for God’s sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would’ve puked if he could see it. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#human-nature #humanity #people #truth #beauty

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#sagan #science #courage

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become. ↗

— Brooke Foss Westcott

#courage #cowardice #development #humanity #strength

What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands? ↗

— Aberjhani

#faith #heaven #hope #humanity #massacre

Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint. ↗

— Ellis Peters

#humanity #saintliness #schadenfreude #nature

And just when you’d think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#good #humanity #dreams

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour. ↗

— Aberjhani

#christianity #human-nature #humanity #intolerance #islam