82 Human condition Quotes

There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, or captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable; nor does it appear that the happiest lot of terrestrial existence can set us above the want of this general blessing; or that life, when the gifts of nature and of fortune are accumulated upon it, would not still be wretched, were it not elevated and delighted by the expectation of some new possession, of some enjoyment yet behind, by which the wish shall at last be satisfied, and the heart filled up to its utmost extent.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Daughter of Jove, relentless power, Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour The bad affright, afflict the best!

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

I understand his longing for immortality : Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.

Much learning shows how little mortals know; Much wealth, how little worldlings can enjoy.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief's that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have: What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal - all the pleasures of life, and then death.

I think it speaks to our basic fundamental feelings, you know. Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.

Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she [Nature] abandon to cries and lamentations.

Nature's law, That man was made to mourn.

But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

So goth the world, now wo, now wel.

I saw him going the way of all flesh.

You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' and he says, 'Oh fine, fine - couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

O grandes e gravissimos perigos! O caminho de vida nunca certo: Que aonde a gente poe sua esperanca, Tenha a vida tao pouca seguranca! No mar tanta tormenta, e tanto dano, Tantas vezes a morte apercebida! Na terra tanta guerra, tanto engano, Tanta necessidade avorrecida! Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano, Onde tera segura a curta vida, Que nao se arme, e se indigne o Ceu sereno Contra um bicho da terra tao pequeno?

Perfection or freedom from error comes only from grace.

Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all - the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.

D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous?

I think, ofttimes, that lives of men may be Likened to wandering winds that come and go Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.

Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido.

'In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence.'

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

'El Hombre' from Al Que Quiere! (1917)

Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time... in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul.

Jesli tematem sztuki bedzie dzbanek rozbity mala rozbita dusza z wielkim zalem nad soba to co po nas zostanie bedzie jak placz kochankow w malym brudnym hotelu kiedy switaja tapety

''Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?''

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.

Sibelius has an acutely developed sense of identification with nature and a preoccupation with myth that at one and the same time define his unique strength and his basic limitation. These preoccupations override his involvement in the human predicament, except in so far as it affects man's relationship with nature.

I know my life's a pain and but a span, I know my sense is mocked with everything; And to conclude, I know myself a man, Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.

I live on hope and that I think do all Who come into this world.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a 'useless passion,' that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined.