Human Condition Quotes

Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Cursed be the ground for our sake. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for us. For out of the ground we were taken, for the dust we are and to the dust we shall return.

Just as the dog loves to chew bones, the human mind loves its problems.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.

Humans eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly, they start cutting reality up into bits and pieces, which is what the thinking mind does.

We are surrounded by abysses, but the greatest of all depths is in our own heart, and an irresistible leaning leads us there. Draw thyself from thyself!

The human condition: lost in thought.

Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less. These two movements obscure the fact that Being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, Now.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, whobuilt his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;MCato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

In every life, no matter how full or empty ones purse, there is tragedy. It is the one promise life always fulfills. Thus, happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes, and to add to other peoples store of it.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

From attachment comes longing, and longing breeds anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion, confused memory. From confused memory comes the ruin of discrimination; and from the ruin of discrimination, a man perishes.

People are born soft and weak. They die hard and stiff.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist

Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

Man, when living, is soft and tender; when dead, he is hard and tough. All animals and plants when living are tender and delicate; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.

Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness

We come into the world alone and we die alone. Why, in life, should we be any less alone?

Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!

The fine emotions whence our lives we moldLie in the earthly tumult dumb and cold.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone - all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe.

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?

It's normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you're using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal - if he's living a normal life. And if it's normal, how can it be bad?

If Heaven and Earth are unable to persist, how could man?

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.

Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

Great and small suffer the same mishaps.

Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

Happiness is not the portion of man.

We are all damaged goods in recovery.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand.

Although an increasing number of humans are undergoing a process of awakening, identification with thinking is still the prevalent state of consciousness. Thinking is potentially a powerful tool, but it has taken us over, and a lot of it is dysfunctional and negative.

Alas, where is there still a sea in which one could drown: thus our lament resounds – across shallow swamps.

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.

How could passion run so deepHad I never thoughtThat the crime of being bornBlackens all our lot?