Human-condition Quotes

If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cann...

Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of...

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in th...

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleani...

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing i...

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body i...

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

We are gods with anuses.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider ...

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds its...

But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guil...

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ult...

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men...

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an ...

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not ...

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its ...

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make he...

Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they n...

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition...

We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, ...

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, her...

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert...

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about...

The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and ...

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us ...

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of be...

Now, it’s undeniably true that male writers (including yours truly) are generally and commercially a...

Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the for...

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became tr...

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul...

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul...

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or...

...children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and ...

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels a...

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that i...

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the...

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace ...

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes o...

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it...

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. ...

jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universa...

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of i...