Quotes About What It Is To Be Human

#1. One of the most interesting things for me in playing another species is that you want to make them different enough to be alien but have enough human qualities to be relatable. This really forces you to look at what it is to be human from a totally new perspective!

Jaime Murray

#2. The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

Jacques D'Amboise

#3. We tell myths over and over again, lest we forget who we are, lest we not understand that these tales take us through the darkness of our lives, and they put us into a place where you understand what it is to be human.

Julie Taymor

#4. I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.

Niall Ferguson

#5. The things keeping you back-these embarrassing, boring, stupid obstacles-are the heart of what it is to be human. They're the whole reason for making and needing art. So you might as well go ahead and begin in whatever way you can right now.

Miranda July

#6. Please understand this: there is no darkness inside us which is not entirely normal; no guilty secret we hold that is not the guilty secret of many. This is what it is to be human. Who, therefore, can judge?

Simon Parke

#7. I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

Rainn Wilson

#8. A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory
and shame and shabbiness
of what it is to be human.

Carolyn See

#9. Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.

Nicola Griffith

#10. You know deep down something is over a long time before you face it and do something about it. In bed, as in life, we pass through endless little deaths and wake reborn from them to start again. This is what it is to be human.

Chloe Thurlow

#11. Tonglen means "taking in and sending out". This meditation practice is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts. Instead of shielding and protecting our soft spot, with tonglen we could let ourselves feel what it is to be human.

Pema Chodron

#12. The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

Dennis Potter

#13. Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

Kurt Vonnegut

#14. We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

Rainn Wilson

#15. The Church of England holds very firmly, and continues to hold to the view, that marriage is a lifelong union of one man to one woman. At the same time, at the heart of our understanding of what it is to be human is the essential dignity of the human being.

Justin Welby

#16. Trust is to human relationships what faith is to gospel living. It is the beginning place, the foundation upon which more can be built. Where trust is, love can flourish.

Barbara Smith

#17. All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

Cynthia Ozick

#18. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.

Henry Adams

#19. The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.

Mark Steyn

#20. And it is not enough in the world for a wise brain to be ridiculed, it must also be wounded & mistreated; a head that is a treasury of wisdom should not expect any crown other than one of thorns. What garland can human wisdom expect when it sees what divine wisdom received?

Juana Ines De La Cruz

#21. Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.

Dean Koontz

#22. Making people change because you can't deal with who they are isn't how it's supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses. You say 'cure.' I hear 'you're not human enough.

John Scalzi

#23. Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

Rosamund Pike

#24. Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.

Georges Bataille

#25. I think acting is revealing to people what it means to be human.

Nick Enright

#26. Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs ... We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us.

Mike Hulme

#27. But as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Heidi Julavits

#28. Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.

Rachel Carson

#29. You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.

Desmond Tutu

#30. What we call human is nothing but a dance of trillions of well organized, interconnected, interesting, and magical molecules.

Debasish Mridha

#31. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#32. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.

Dennis Gabor

#33. If we're going to make a politically responsible and a scientifically sensible claim it should not be stop the world exactly where it is because that's not possible. It has to be to decide what kind of world do we as human beings want to live in.

Richard Lewontin

#34. As human beings, we can encompass a vague feeling of what the universe is, and all in this funny little brain here - so there has to be something more than just brain, it has to be something to do with spirit as well.

Jane Goodall

#35. Who says we don't want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it's some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?

Dave Eggers

#36. Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.

Thomas Jefferson

#37. It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand - that is what is necessary.

Maria Montessori

#38. Marcie: I know you're still wounded. Danny, you have to let it go. That is what this mind game is all about, discovering who we are.
Humans lie to themselves all the time. There should be no disgrace in being human, that is what I believe.

Andrew Neff

#39. It is hard to think of practical applications of the black hole. Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings.

Yuri Milner

#40. He taught me to be a Da Vinci
and I sit here, with his portraits
waiting for him to return
I do not think he will
Is that what it means to be human
to be all powerful,
to build a temple to yourself
and leave
only the walls to pray

Phil Kaye

#41. Is the human creature as perfect in function as it might be?' 'Meaningless,' replied Cabal, 'with no definition as to what that function might conceivably be. We are good communicators, passable runners, middling swimmers, and poor at flying.

Jonathan L. Howard

#42. Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

Sue Monk Kidd

#43. Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?

Kim Stanley Robinson

#44. I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don't sometimes necessarily make sense.

Brene Brown

#45. People have forgotten what the human touch is, what it is to smile, for somebody to smile at them, somebody to recognize them, somebody to wish them well. The terrible thing is to be unwanted.

Mother Teresa

#46. This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

Harold S. Kushner

#47. If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you'll be feeling what they're feeling. If you're separated, it's not a hard thing to do at all.

Eve Ensler

#48. I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

Christopher Hitchens

#49. Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#50. Have you ever experienced human love?"

"Yes. Once."

Regret shadowed his face. "Then why would you be willing to repeat it?"

"What we learn is worth more than what we lose.

Elizabeth Langston

#51. Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.

Arnold Bennett

#52. Caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human.

Hillary Clinton

#53. The people I know who suffer from mental illness, sometimes they do connect you to what it is to be really human. There's a vulnerability there, there's something very potent.

Maya Forbes

#54. Out of love, God becomes man. He says: See, here is what it is to be a human being.

Soren Kierkegaard

#55. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

Terence McKenna

#56. The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.

Yann Martel

#57. You could either be trapped by what was going on around you, or you could find a way out. I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to help elevate and expand us as human beings.

Demi Moore

#58. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

Gao Xingjian

#59. Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

Joshua Bell

#60. Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.

John Muir

#61. I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.

Kim Ki-duk

#62. Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human.

Liv Ullmann

#63. And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.

John Stuart Mill

#64. In a world like this with no laws, no charter of human rights, it's the women who suffer. It's the women who learn what it is to be tough, not the men.

Alex Scarrow

#65. What is it about the human face that it should be the most memorable thing in existence and yet its atoms are the quickest to disperse?

Marius Kociejowski

#66. I would like to believe that it is, and will continue to be, human compassion for other beings that will result in our giving them the protection they deserve, because of who they are, not because of what they can do for us or because some law tells us what we have to do.

Marc Bekoff

#67. Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Yusef Komunyakaa

#68. For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

David Foster Wallace

#69. Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

Paul Samuelson

#70. Fast food, fast money, shallow thinking, shallow interpretations. This is now what I deal with everyday. Art was meant to be about freedom, about having the courage to explore what it means to be human.

Emma Raveling

#71. Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

David Whyte

#72. Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human ... and we are the people driving that change.

Daniel Keys Moran

#73. The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#74. What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#75. The song, to me, is about what it is to be a human, what it is to love someone as a human being, and organizations that would undermine that, and undermine the more natural parts of being a person

Hozier

#76. Fashion is an industry to make money. It plays into human psychology. We want to belong, we want to be loved. I'm not trying to demonize the fashion industry - I love the fashion industry - but style is about taking the control out of the industry's hand and having you decide what works for you.

Stacy London

#77. We need to remind ourselves of the beauty of human connection and of nature and pull ourselves out of devices for a moment and appreciate what it is just to be human beings.

Olivia Wilde

#78. If you sell the Vatican and you take that money and you use it to feed every single human being on the planet, you will get cah-azy pussy. All the pussy. I don't mean literally. That might not be your cup of tea. I don't know what your version of 'all the pussy' is. But you'll get all the pussy.

Sarah Silverman

#79. Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.

Rosamund Pike

#80. Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

Al Alvarez

#81. I would never tell you what to believe, Daniel, so please don't tell me that my opinion is wrong. We should be allowed a few basic human rights in life: the right to decide what goes into our bodies and the right to have an opinion without feeling shamed for it.

Jewel E. Ann

#82. Artifacts are alive. Each has a voice. They remind us what it means to be human - that it is our nature to survive, to create works of beauty to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in.

Terry Tempest Williams

#83. Things change all the time, and they'll probably never be the same again. It's just the natural evolution of the human condition. Things change, and whatever it is is what it is. I mean, you try to start second guessing that, you either get rich or die broke.

Guy Clark

#84. It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.

William Godwin

#85. And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

Dallas Willard

#86. What he's really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it's so easy to forget that's what they are. She knows - she sees - how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.

Neal Shusterman

#87. If this is what it's like to be human, he thought, no wonder the world is so fucked up.

Daryl Gregory

#88. Look at me, Sarah." She did. "What ever it is, whatever is going on ... it can't be that bad. I'm a vampire sweetheart. I drink human blood on a regular basis. What can you possibly have to tell me that could top that?

D.B. Reynolds

#89. A human brain is encased in a skull and each human exists in separete body so it seems like there is always going to be a feeling of disconnect. One human being will never completely understand what another human is thinking or feeling

Gabby Bess

#90. I'm interested in everything about what it means to be a human being, so every role is an excuse to delve into a different way of life, a different socio-economic background, and a different tragic or comedic circumstance.

Rachelle Lefevre

#91. The most powerful state for a human to be in is the state of embracing completely the reality of what is - Now. It is to say "Yes" to life, which is now and always now. There is a vast power in that "Yes," that state of inner non-resistance to what is.

Eckhart Tolle

#92. You know what I want to think of myself? As a human being. Because, I mean I don't want to be like As Confucius say, but under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family. It just so happens that people are different.

Bruce Lee

#93. A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

Simon Schama

#94. In every human heart is a place where you put all your broken dreams. When something doesn't work out, no matter what it may be, you just have to give it up and stuff it in with your broken dreams. And make sure you keep the lid on tight.

Sayo Masuda

#95. When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats.

Evgeny Morozov

#96. To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.

Anne Rice

#97. I feel that joy is the basic emotion of life and of human beings. It's what supports everything. We are here to be happy. We are to enjoy "alegria."

Alex Abreu

#98. But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?

Anton Chekhov

#99. Life is brief, even at its longest. Whatever you are going to do with your life, get at it. All good will be attacked. All values must be defended. In all areas of the human existence, what we put into this world, we get back from it.

Jim Rohn

#100. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock