#humanit

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality-not as we expect it to be but as it is-is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#life-lessons #love #freedom

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#culture #human #humanity #life #perspective

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#life #nature #life

Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them. ↗

— Nate Silver

#life

Just because I wasn’t human, didn’t mean I could discount human life. (Eric) ↗

— Shannon A. Thompson

#fiction #human #humanity #life #paranormal-romance

I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#individuals #love #mankind #love

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. ↗