Quotes About Beings

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

If we turn away from our sexual passion, then we freeze and beings are harmed. If we grab it, then we are burned and beings are harmed. But if we just stay close to it, walk around it, always in touch with the fact that we are sexual beings, neither identifying with nor distancing ourselves from our sexuality, then we gradually become intimate with it.

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

WHETHER BEINGS LOVE ME OR FEAR ME IS IRRELEVANT. IF BEINGS GIVE ME THEIR ATTENTION I WILL TAKE THEM TO ENLIGHTENMENT AND BLISS.

Dogs are intelligent beings; they are not human beings. The life of a dog - there's no equivalency with the life of a person, and if you are putting a dog in the line of danger to save human life, and they can do the job reasonably well, I mean, seriously, what about dignity and self-respect? I feel like going out to dinner, I think I will have my cocker spaniel host the show tonight.

I've come to learn as an adult that love is a hell of a drug. It's one of the most dangerous things that human beings can have. It's also one of the most beautiful things that human beings can possess because love, on one hand, gives you the ability to care for a human being sometimes more than you would care for yourself. Love, unfortunately, sometimes gives you the ability to forgive somebody and blind yourself to the truth.

We go to sea repeatedly from Melville's time on - and the image of men at sea, like the image of men in the wilderness, seems to me to be almost an archetypal image of human beings on their own, human beings making their own way, guiding themselves by the stars they can see - rather than by faith or prayer or invisible forces.

In ethics all individual humans are rightly seen, not only as beings to whom things matter, but as beings who accordingly merit concern and solicitude.

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

We are human beings, beings whose fundamental food is the experience of truth.

Victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.

Micromessaging -- communicating with other human beings through visual, audible, sublingual means, no doubt predates our ability to speak. We actually read micromessages quite naturally without thinking about them. You might say human beings read each other's micromessages subconsciously, in the same way that one dog understands another dog is unfriendly simply because the dog's fur is standing on end. The dogs read each other perfectly. It's not all that different for people.

The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

Insofar as human beings flower on the ground of freedom, justice guards that ground. Insofar as human beings flower in the soil of community, justice tends that soil. Justice makes possible a social order that people can truly be said to share freely.

There is at the moment in the world a battle going on between those who are pursuing materialistic paths-globalizers of economic growth and those hell-bent on this 'big is better' idea-on the one hand, and on the other hand those who are dedicated to spiritual renewal, more small-scale development, more human scale, more sustainability, more crafts and arts. Where human beings are not just sold to companies and money and those kinds of things. Where human beings have a sacred path.

Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.

Today . . . we know that all living beings who strive to maintain life and who long to be spared pain - all living beings on earth - are our neighbors.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

If the basic human nature was aggressive, we would have been born with animal claws & huge teeth -- but ours are very short, very pretty, very weak! That means we are not well equipped to be aggressive beings. Even the size of our mouth is very small. So I think the basic nature of human beings should be gentle.

Seen through the eyes of faith, religion's future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature - one whose morphe (form) is theos - God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.

I reached the point in my life now that I understand as human beings we've all done some very horrible things to other human beings, and at some point, I came to grips with the fact that whoever murdered my friend is now an adult, and all I can truly hopefully pray for is that in murdering my friend it bettered their life. And I don't mean that they gained things, but just that they grew up, they regret their decision, they found a place of spirituality or God or whatever people call it.

The obedience of men is to imitate the obedience of angels, and rational beings on earth are to live unto God, as rational beings in heaven live unto Him.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.

Knowledge acquired in biological research is seldom directly applicable to human beings ... The results of scientific research, obtained under these conditions, cannot be applied directly to human beings who vary widely in their hereditary make-up, in their environment, and in their past health record.

At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.

It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.

Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?

It's not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it - who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet - that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time they don't. It's just that simple.

Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.

I believe there's no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended. They're created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.

DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.

Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

American exceptionalism, in the broad sense, is not a bunch of braggadocious words people say, "Yeah, we're better people. We have a better country. We are higher class people." That's not what it is. America was the exception to the way human beings prior to America, most of which lived.

If the monkeys had been concerned only with monkey Beings they would never have become men.

Beware of "grandfalloons" and "foma". A "grandfalloon" is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. "Foma" are harmless truths intended to comfort simple souls.

People do make mistakes and I think they should be punished. But they should be forgiven and given the opportunity for a second chance. We are human beings.

Human beings. People's stories. That's really what gets me excited.

Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

We may be a nation of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, but first and foremost we are all human beings and Americans.

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

I've had a couple of ghost experiences, but I'm not a big fan of the spiritual side of things, of the ghost type thing. I don't know why, maybe it freaks me out a bit, or I'm more into tangible, physical beings rather than things that can pass through walls.

Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life's journey.