Top 100 Quotes About Human Existence
#1. Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.
Leon Botstein
#2. Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Joan D. Vinge
#3. It is merely the egoism of the man, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#4. Architecture is the frame of human existence. We must dedicate this existence more to beauty. For if poetic principle has deserted us, how long are we going to last?
Frank Lloyd Wright
#5. Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
Viktor E. Frankl
#6. We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.
Jean Toomer
#7. Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.
Don DeLillo
#8. If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light.
Milan Kundera
#9. A challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence ... There is no doubt that the time to act is now.
Tony Blair
#10. the only way to eliminate hypocrisy from human existence is to abandon all principles whatsoever;
Theodore Dalrymple
#11. There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
Carson McCullers
#12. The religion I know most about, which is the Christian one, would simply say that it's not really for one man or woman to know fully and to understand the nature of our brief human existence.
Sebastian Faulks
#13. Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#14. Human existence basically is--a never to be completed imperfect tense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#15. Economics brings into view that conflict of choice is one of the permanent characteristics of human existence.
Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins
#16. Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.
Josef Pieper
#17. Grace is a much more accurate word to use when dealing with the state of human existence. God gives us unmerited favor through Jesus Christ, and since Adam and Eve, our lives have depended on it.
Monica Johnson
#18. finding God or a higher power reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. There is much we don't understand about human existence, and there is order and purpose to it anyway. It helps us feel that our suffering is not random or meaningless." Yet
Sheryl Sandberg
#19. Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer.
Pope Benedict XVI
#20. Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.
Denis Waitley
#21. When the universe is ephemeral, one can easily feel that human existence is meaningless. Why should I do anything at all?
On the other hand it is tempting to try and make the best of it. I'm here, anyway. The imagination won't cope if I try to picture where I'd otherwise be.
Erlend Loe
#22. Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.
Michael Mandelbaum
#24. The problem of money dogs our steps throughout the whole of our lives, exerting a pressure that, in its way, is as powerful and insistent as any other problem of human existence. And it haunts the spiritual search as well.
Jacob Needleman
#25. Uncertainty is a good thing at the end of a narrative. A simultaneous gain and loss captures the complexity of human existence. The way one sentence follows another, if we pay attention to syntax and rhythm, should express the final effect we want the narrative to have on a reader.
Lee Martin
#26. Care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light ...
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#27. Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence - not detachment and objectivity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. Pain, suffering, and death are natural conditions of the human existence. One person's pain is not and cannot be more important than another's.
Megan Thomason
#29. The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.
Erik Naggum
#30. For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness - parent of all horrors.
Thomas Ligotti
#31. Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
A. N. Wilson
#32. He himself didn't see it as exceptionally altruistic, because he had understood one can't be truly happy in isolation or, worse, among unhappy people. The best protection against danger, unhappiness and the sordidness of human existence is to be surrounded by people who love you.
Andrew Ashling
#33. Love turns ma into an ocean of happiness, an image of peace, a temple of wisdom. Love is every man's very Self, his true beauty, and the glory of his human existence.
Swami Muktananda
#34. War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Tim O'Brien
#35. Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence.
Vanna Bonta
#36. Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
Carl Jung
#37. Human existence is partnered with spiritual laws; it's the foundation of the human experience
We all ultimately want a pain free existence, unfortunately circumstances of unrest bring to light the spiritual laws designed to play themselves out in the everyday experiences of the human race.
Brian Edward Arsenault
#38. Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.
Ludwig Von Mises
#39. I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.
Mark Twain
#40. When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we've perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence.
Sharon Salzberg
#41. It is merely the egoism of men, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love. Can you deny that our Christina world is rotting?
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#42. If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational
indeed it is no universe at all.
Joseph Alexander Leighton
#43. A bed is a place where so much of life is played out - births and deaths and passions and dreaming - all the most fundamental moments of our fragile human existence.
Tracy Rees
#44. It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.
Lucy Larcom
#45. The real you is not sad, angry, depressed, ashamed, hurt, bitter or lost. These things are not real. They feel real but they're not. As spiritual beings living a brief human existence, this is not who we are. We are beautiful, radiant, joyful and loving.
Sue Fitzmaurice
#46. For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.
David Cronenberg
#47. To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.
David Whyte
#48. We give antibiotics to people when they're dying or when they're not well; that's acting God. I mean, acting God is using the tools of creation to try and improve human life, human existence. I don't think that that's a huge problem.
Robert Winston
#49. Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Milan Kundera
#50. The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself ... Love of oneself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.
Louise J. Kaplan
#51. Trust is one of the fundamentals of human existence. We need to be able to trust one another. A man who can no longer trust anyone will become sick.
Desmond Tutu
#52. For death and the disease that is its harbinger are the most brutal reminders of the radical finitude of human existence.
Jeffrey P. Bishop
#53. Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
Daniel Barenboim
#54. The intellect of most persons is harnessed by innumerable wants. Such a life is, from the spiritual point of view the lowest type of human existence. The highest type of human existence is free from all wants; and it is characterised by sufficiency or contentment.
Meher Baba
#55. The voice in the head that never stops speaking becomes a civilization that is obsessed with form and therefore knows nothing of the most important dimension of human existence: the sacred, the stillness, the formless, the divine.
Eckhart Tolle
#56. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
William Blake
#57. But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.
Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.
Gaston Bachelard
#58. Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#59. But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.
Karen Armstrong
#60. I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn't realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
Eckhart Tolle
#61. Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#62. This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended ...
Freya Stark
#63. The Bible - the wisest document ever known in human existence, which defies the ravages of time and change because it contains the truth that cannot be changed or invalidated.
Norman Vincent Peale
#64. The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac represents the twelve lessons of human existence, the 12 qualities to be developed in the formation of the perfect man (and woman).
Vera Stanley Alder
#65. We are born into this precious human existence to achieve the uni cation of opposites and become enlightened, or liberated, from the illusion of separation.
Dashama Konah Gordon
#66. Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.
Peter Ackroyd
#67. Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.
Desmond Tutu
#68. All human existence is a trick of light.
Don DeLillo
#69. Human-caused climate change threatens almost every aspect of human existence.
Alan Lowenthal
#70. The world [is] tired of ideology [and] is opening itself to the truth. The time has come when the splendor of this truth has begun anew to illuminate the darkness of human existence.
Pope John Paul II
#71. Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; knowledge without compassion is inhuman.
Victor Frederick Weisskopf
#72. The Light of one human being who discovers the Truth has been lighting human existence for thousands of years. Such is the power of a human being who realizes the Truth of who they are.
Mooji
#73. An intimate encounter with Jesus is the most transforming experience of human existence. To know him as he is, is to come home. To have his life, joy, love, and presence cannot be compared. A true knowledge of Jesus is our greatest need and our greatest happiness.
John Eldredge
#74. Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence.
Charles William Eliot
#75. ... the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
C. G. Jung
#76. is Mary, the lowly virgin from Nazareth, in whom a new beginning takes place, in whom human existence starts afresh.
Pope Benedict XVI
#77. Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
Viktor E. Frankl
#78. The only worthwhile constant in human existence is our heart which can only be nourished by sincere love. A good strong heart radiates love in all directions perpetually. The heart is also the most fragile of human existence. Therefore, take good care of it. Give it constant love.
Sohail Mahmood
#79. Real meaningful endeavours, the biggies in human existence, often require the sacrifice of others.
Andrew Schneider
#80. Science without discrimination Human existence without discipline Friendship without gratitude Music without melody A society without morality and justice Cannot be of benefit to the people.
Sai Baba
#81. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existence
-Eli
Sarah Dessen
#83. The important thing is how much consciousness you add to the whole of human existence, for that is how eternity expresses itself.
Deepak Chopra
#84. No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence
Smiley Blanton
#85. Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way.
Thomas Merton
#86. On the one hand poetry is useless. It can't change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It's what makes human beings human.
Bei Dao
#87. Happiness is the primary goal of human existence.
Joey Lawsin
#88. Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.
Lewis Mumford
#89. Genetic evolutionists warn that if we fail to apply the lessons of our shared genetic destiny, which should be teaching us the importance of cooperation among all species, we threaten human existence.
Bruce H. Lipton
#90. Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace.
John Desmond Bernal
#91. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!
C. G. Jung
#92. I was really struck by all these people who had committed suicide. There are videos of all of them talking about why they're so happy to shed their human existence and exit their "vehicles" and I thought, "Why is that?"
Joshuah Bearman
#93. I like to express true emotions under the cover of melancholy: It includes fulfilment and pain, which describes human existence.
Volker Bertelmann
#94. Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
Andrew O'Hagan
#95. Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.
Simone Weil
#96. To be known by God is the highest goal of human existence.
R.C. Sproul
#97. Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.
Paul Di Filippo
#98. A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
James Buchan
#99. I think art is about human existence. Almost by default I'm expressing my experiences as a human.
Robert Gober
#100. When you start with legal holiness, you have eyes only for the cross, and you never see that in Jesus Christ, nothing less than the eternal trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit is being lived out inside human existence. You never really get the staggering meaning of the incarnation.
C. Baxter Kruger
