#humans

I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things? You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather? Yes. It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous. Such as? Be not in haste, said the tortoise. There is nothing here but time. If you live long enough, you will see. Of course, though, you will see them from your cage. Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here? The tortoise chuckled. The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in. What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough? Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough. How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked. ↗

— Patrick Jennings

#humans #lizard #pets #power #reptiles

...the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life. ↗

— Pentti Linkola

#misanthrope #noremorse #overpopulation #life

It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers. ↗

— Yann Martel

#humans #people #life

The most important thing for any con artist is never to think like a mark. Marks think they can get something for nothing. Marks think they can get what they don’t deserve and could never deserve. Marks are stupid and pathetic and sad. Marks think they’re going to go home one night and have the girl they’ve loved since they were a kid suddenly love them back. Marks forget that whenever something’s too good to be true, that’s because it’s a con. ↗

— Holly Black

#humans #marks #love

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain. ↗

— Junot Díaz

#difficulty #honesty #humans #love #love

As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant. ↗

— Megan McCafferty

#humans #jessica-darling #significance #nature

There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed! ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#marveling #nature #self #wonders #nature

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. ↗

— Mary Roach

#space-travel #food

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe. ↗

— Kevin J. Anderson

#come #fact #hey #humans #kind

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#appropriate #because #conditions #diverse #happens