To Be Human Quotes

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.
- Chris Abani

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

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

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
- Douglas Adams

And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.
- M T Anderson

You've certainly mellowed out... you used to be fun, full of life and emotion. Lust, Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Pride. Of course, excessive want will destroy anyone, but those same desires are necessary to understand what it means to be human. Why did you rid yourself of them?
- Hiromu Arakawa

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
- Antonin Artaud

Augustine taught that true freedom is not choice or lack of constraint, but being what you are meant to be. Humans were created in the image of God. True freedom, then, is not found in moving away from that image but only in living it out.
- Saint Augustine Of Hippo

If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.
- Joan Baez

Nobody knew what it was like to be torn between what it meant to be human and what it meant to be Pack better than me.
- Jennifer Lynn Barnes

And if we fail? (Delphine)
It'll suck to be human. (Madoc)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

I didn't swear an oath of secrecy, and I figure you've seen enough spooky shit the last few days that knowing about me is the least of your problems. Besides, I dare you to tell anyone I'm really a wolf pretending to be human. I double dog dare you. That, my friend, will get you locked inside a rubber room. (Vane)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

A person is a person through other persons.
None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.
- Desmond Tutu

When political figures are shown on television or in movies, it's always the liberal Democrats that are shown to be humane, caring people.
- Pat Boone

Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste.
- Bertolt Brecht

Sometimes I want to be human for you.
- Sarah Rees Brennan

I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots....You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human - to be human. And we humans...have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted humani above the Elders, it is what made them great.
- Michael Scott

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.
- Frederick Buechner

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
- Ted Chiang

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.
- Brian Christian

I think you are wise. You haven't got what it takes for this job. You are like Rosemary's father. He couldn't understand Lenin's dictum: 'Away with softness.'"
I thought of Hercule Poirot's words.
"I'm content," I said, "to be human...."
We sat there in silence, each of use convinced that the other's point of view was wrong.
- Agatha Christie

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
- Eldridge Cleaver

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
- Terry Pratchett

Don't be afraid to be human - you're human, you're going to have emotional days. You're going to have days when things suck and then some days when things are great, but don't feel guilty because you're experiencing that. Don't feel guilty from being human.
- Chris Colfer

How embarrassing to be human.
- Kurt Vonnegut

It's embarrassing to be human.
- Kurt Vonnegut

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

How embarrassing it is to be human.
- Kurt Vonnegut

We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
- Don Delillo

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
- Don Delillo

I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us--to remind us how to be human.
- John Green

I guess these days this is a politically charged statement, but it seems to me manifestly true: You make nothing alone. Human beings are not mere competitors, and human life is not merely competition. We are collaborators. To be human is to catch the falling person.
- John Green

It is, therefore, a fact that anybody who wants to realise Truth or who wants to be humane, must follow non-violent ways of life, otherwise he will not be able to reach the Truth.
- Morarji Desai

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!
- Henry Miller

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
- Henry Miller

I know I lost my temper, but I tried to be human along the way.
- Bernard Ebbers

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
- George Orwell

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
- Stephen Fry

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'
- Robert Fulghum

She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it.
Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.
- Steven Galloway

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

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.
- Terry Gross

For awhile I taped soap operas and watched them at night when I thought I might be forgetting what it was like to be human. After a while I stopped, because from the examples I saw on those shows, forgetting humanity was a good thing.
- Charlaine Harris

A gull planed steeply over their heads, a precarious flash of white against the windy blue sky. The short, hacking cry of a baby seemed to merge seamlessly for a moment with the gull's repetitive wail, as if they were one species. One species, Falkender thought, raucous and scavenging; one species calling out in pain. To be human is to be mixed and miscegenated like this. To be lost.
- M John Harrison

To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane.
- Jane Harrison

This pain is part of being human, the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.
Then I don't want to be human.
- J K Rowling

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

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

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.
- Shirley Knight

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.
- Anne Lamott

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
- Anne Lamott

But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
- C S Lewis

That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.
- Jeff Lindsay

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

I feel it respectful to observe and practice new customs, if I am to ever understand what it truly means to be human.
- Jacob D Lochner

Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.
- Jack London

The moon is a loyal companion.
It never leaves. It's always here, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human.
Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.
- Tahereh Mafi

I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.
- Gregory Maguire

There's never been a rule of human behavior that hasn't been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules.
- Ian Mcdonald

Running is the heart of what it means to be human.
- Christopher Mcdougall

Tolerence ought to be humanities community and knowledge should be an individuals goal.
- Clarrissa Lee Moon

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

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

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

I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.
- Maggie Stiefvater

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

Everyone in the world should read this book... We should read it to learn about the world and what it means to be human.
- Carolyn See

There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.
A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman...
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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 humanI only love to be so.
- Zadie Smith

He leaned down and kissed my forehead. The soft melody of his lips was calming. I closed my eyes. I could smell his human skin, his human breath, his human hair, and for the first time, I would give anything to be human too.
- Alysha Speer

This is always a pain because it's injustice too and so my response to it, I tell you what I am more surprised or horrified at Jews who forget to be humanists than I am at anybody else.
- Janet Suzman

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.
- Anthony Trollope

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

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I'm a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.
I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.
There is only one verb that matters: to be.
- Catherynne M Valente

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
- David Foster Wallace

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
- Terry Tempest Williams

To be human is to be beautifully flawed
- Eric Wilson

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