#humanit

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended ↗

— Stephen King

#love #love

To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#imperfection #love #love

I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"! ↗

— Walter Alexander Raleigh

#humanity #misanthropy #society #love

We do not see the world through a window, but through a mirror. Everything we discern is comparatively held to the vision with which we see ourselves. ↗

— LeeAnn Taylor

#hope #humanity #light #love #people

Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up? ↗

— Peter Orner

#history #humanity #mankind #march #need

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises? ↗

— William Wilberforce

#perspective #understanding #men

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#death #friendship #humanity #procrastination #weaknesses

Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatoza attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the reveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique, but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct artifacts, but so have species ranging from beavers to the architecture ants... Yes, we weave real fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) ↗

— Dan Simmons

#science #architecture

History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit. ↗

— Thomas B. Costain

#humanity #war #architecture

There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#happiness #humanity #memoir #whole #beauty