Being Human Quotes (page 86)
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Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn....No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee...
Art Buchwald
I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an...
Roberto Bolano
I was seeking within myself the human being I had so long lost sight of, hoping that my passion had only been distorted but had never been completely suppressed, by the social illusion, by the dominant ideal of “concealing emotions”. I wished to shout: “I broke away from your cold and petrified world in which I was one of the wheels running noiselessly in the great machine, one of the idle wheels. I have plunged into an unknown abyss; and in this one hour of the plunge I have lived more fully...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours of men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference among the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may...
George Eliot
upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave macondo, that they forget everything he had taught then about the world and the human heart, that they shit on horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.
Arthur Conan Doyle
So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual...
Herman Melville
In what resides the most characteristic Virtue of humanity?
In good works?
Possibly.
In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps.
But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practiced with more consummated success the divine art of impartiality
Lytton Strachey
It's a beautiful morning, Sire," the guard said"Yes, it is."The Duke nodded, thinking: Perhaps this planet could grow on one. Perhaps it could ba a good home for my son. Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping with them strange scythe-like devices--dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected. And it could be a hideous place, the Duke thought.
Frank Herbert
We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of ? on the score of orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs from our own.
Victor Hugo