Top 100 To Be Human Quotes
#1. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn't to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.
Matthew Thomas
#2. 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
#3. Once again, there was talk of winning every game, and once again, we proved to be human, because an oblong ball takes funny bounces.
Michael Pinball Clemons
#4. The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#5. I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
Rob Bell
#6. Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?
Clarice Lispector
#7. How strange it is to be human. For a short moment we are conscious of the glories of life then we become silent again. Perhaps there is more. Look more deeply into the matter.
Frederick Lenz
#8. We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
Antonin Artaud
#9. To be human is to be broken and broken is its own kind of beautiful.
Drake
#10. What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the the sky, a rainbow.
Alexander McCall Smith
#11. To be human was to be melodramatic, to feel things acutely, love and hate and lust, to search for the Holy Grail, outrun the other kids in the fifty-yard dash and care mightily about it.
Nevada Barr
#12. Alice wonders if anyone has ever tended Jill, in any way, and if her intelligent ferocity is what happens when a girl has had to teach herself how to be human.
Kate Racculia
#13. Our officials want nothing more than to be at the top of their professional game and make the correct call. That's what they do; that's their living, that's their pride, that's their joy. They don't achieve that because they happen to be human.
David Stern
#14. If a being from another world were to ask you, "How can I learn what it's like to be human?" a good answer would be, "Study mythology.
Joseph Campbell
#16. To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.
Spider Robinson
#17. 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
#18. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
Henry Miller
#19. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
George Orwell
#20. I know I lost my temper, but I tried to be human along the way.
Bernard Ebbers
#21. To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
#22. What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?
John Brunner
#23. To be human is to be challenged to be more divine. Not even to try to meet such a challenge is the biggest defeat imaginable.
Maya Angelou
#24. The very right to be human is denied every day to hundreds of millions of people as a result of poverty, the unavailability of basic necessities such as food, jobs, water and shelter, education, health care and a healthy environment.
Nelson Mandela
#25. You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Eldridge Cleaver
#26. Gerald's look assured her that he and the others would be as near angels as children could be without ceasing to be human.
E. Nesbit
#27. He is human. I hadn't wanted him to be human. I had wanted him to be perfect and golden - steady and solid, simple and strong - so that I could be messy, complicated, and weak. But we are each all of those things.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#28. To be seen to be human, provided you're doing your job at the same time, is definitely not a negative, not at all.
Charles Kennedy
#29. Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures - one human, the other divine - while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human but was in fact fully God.
Reza Aslan
#31. 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
#32. Since Pussy never had thought, nor would she think, that women shouldn't have abortions, she had to come to terms with the realization that to be human, and woman, includes the possibility and even the act of murder.
Kathy Acker
#33. Bless
their believing happiness will make them happy;
that the ocean is magical, a kingdom
where we go to be human,
and grateful.
Philip Schultz
#35. But when you're a lemon who happens to be human, everyone tries to help you out
Finn Bell
#36. Maybe learning to be human was about learning to live in pain, not trying to figure out how to live pain-free. (156)
Keith Ablow
#37. Today, God, help me to know that it is okay to allow myself to be human. Help me not to feel guilty or punish myself when I need to "fall apart.
Melody Beattie
#38. We all pretend, we all hide things, so why not take the concept to an extreme? That is the basic idea for the character of Dexter. Pretend to be human, while quietly and carefully living out the life of a monster on the side.
Jeff Lindsay
#39. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.
Tahereh Mafi
#40. If I were given a choice, I would stand by Eve and eat that forbidden apple once again. Why? I know there is beauty and meaning and significance in the complexity of our lives on earth. Otherwise, we are just animals. I prefer us to be human.
J.D. Radke
#41. We're going to be human, and we are going to make mistakes, but you really should understand the power that you have and embrace it in a positive way.
Drake Bell
#42. Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#43. It's a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little.
Ellen Bass
#44. After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.
Joe Rogan
#47. I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
David Foster Wallace
#48. At times, it seems to me that to be human is to want that which we cannot have
Brandon Sanderson
#49. Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.
Ayad Akhtar
#50. the soul said, "Is this what you think it means to be human?
C. G. Jung
#51. He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn't know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion.
Haruki Murakami
#52. If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.
Paul Auster
#53. Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
Junot Diaz
#54. 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
#55. A long arm appeared from the black hole. It latched on to the side of the wall and pulled through the rest of its body. I sat frozen in my seat. The arm was too long to be human; it was just bone with a flesh covering. Whatever was coming through that hole was not something I intended to meet.
K.E. O'Connor
#56. I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings
But what will you do without your hands
to be human?
I am tired of human
she said
I want to live on the sun -
Louise Gluck
#57. The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Honore De Balzac
#58. Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste.
Bertolt Brecht
#59. You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human ... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.
Toni Morrison
#60. Human nature doesn't change. When enough people are comfortable enough financially, there is going to be human nature that wants to spend more money on better quality and, to some degree, status symbols as well.
Danny Meyer
#61. To be human is to seek beauty, Shallan. Do not despair, do not end the hunt because thorns grow in your way.
Brandon Sanderson
#62. If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.
Jaggi Vasudev
#63. If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.
Ivan Klima
#64. What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.
Clarice Lispector
#65. Someone's weaknesses are the strength which allows them to be human.
Michelle Carithers
#66. We've beat up our umpires. They're now allowed to be human.
Joe Torre
#67. Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#68. What allows us to be human is something daemonic.
Heraclitus
#70. I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.
Donald Miller
#71. Christ is the ground of our masculinity. He took Adamic humanity into the grave with him, and emerged with a new way to be human, and a renewed way of being a man.
Joe Rigney
#72. A world that won't forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting. Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.
Tacita Dean
#73. I never thought about it before, but I'm proud to be human. We're ever so flawed. We're frail, confused, violent, and we struggle with so many issues. But all in all, I'm proud to be a Daughter of Man.
Susan Ee
#74. All of the great writers and sages we are so quick to quote have simply given their interpretation of what it means to be human.
Chris Matakas
#75. I see a sign for a bathroom and rush toward it. It feels stupid to be thinking about something as ordinary as going to the bathroom right now, but people still have to pee, still have to cry, still have to be human, no matter what else is happening.
Wendy Mills
#77. I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.
David Lipsky
#78. Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human.
Russell D. Moore
#79. To be human is to care for your fellow human beings and protecting the environment.
Jacque Fresco
#80. To be human is to have a whole spectrum of these experiences that arise within us.
Annie Lennox
#81. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human - I only love to be so.
Zadie Smith
#82. 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
#83. I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered that there were ways in which to be human was unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways.
Saul Bellow
#84. To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
W. H. Auden
#85. It was hard to be human. Hell, it was hard to live at all. Life was definitely not for the meek.
Everytime something seemed to go right, at least 3 or 4 things had to go wrong. It was just the law of nature.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#87. Everyone, no matter how historically famous or modernly praised, has no idea about the ultimate truth of what it means to be human.
Chris Matakas
#88. You do have a Dream. It's part of what it means to be human, created in the image of God.
Bruce Wilkinson
#89. Our main problem is a lack of understanding of what it means to be human and that we are not separate from nature.
Jacque Fresco
#90. Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.
John Blacking
#91. I grew up under the British system, which I think is horrific for children - very, very strict - a system that did not recognize children as being individuals. You were small animals earning the right to be human.
Lorraine Toussaint
#92. That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.
Jeff Lindsay
#93. To be human, is to be able to love the unlovable, and hope when things appear hopeless
Sara Niles
#95. I couldn't help smiling as he grasped my arms and held me in place because his warmth infected me. I hadn't known I was freezing until he held me. I hadn't known until then, after the long hours of separation, that with Cain I could pretend to be human.
Jennifer Silverwood
#96. These people all woke up this morning and reminded themselves to be human beings. Not everyone knows how to do that. No vermin, my people. Real human beings.
Jami Attenberg
#97. The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness.
David J. Morris
#98. Jesus, as the one perfect person who fully embodied what it meant to be human and is the new Adam, is the definition of what it means to be a man. Everything else is false.
Nate Pyle
#99. I feel most people's sexuality is enormously complicated. That's what it means to be human. Wouldn't it be great if we honored that complexity rather than turn it into gossip or ridicule? Wouldn't it be great if we accepted sexual diversity, in ourselves and others, without condemning it?
Janet Jackson
#100. You're like this ... this goddess pretending to be human ... And I don't know which one I love.
Thomm Quackenbush
