#Human Condition Quotes

“When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”

“Earth's a howling wilderness,Truculent with fraud and force.”

“The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

“The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.”

“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.”

“We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.”

“What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth andheaven?”

“The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.”

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

“I'm so bored with it all.”

“The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.”

“Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.”

“We live ruins amid ruins.”

“Is there a difference? Yes. We are in harmony with nature, but never at peace.”

“We are fastened to a dying animal.”

“While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.”

“on the instant clamorous eaves,A climbing moon upon an empty sky,And all that lamentation of the leaves,Could but compose man's image and his cry.”

“All men live in sufferingI know as few can know,Whether they take the upper roadOr stay content on the low.”

“The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.”

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

“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.”

“He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.”

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

“For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

“Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.”

“I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.”

“Man does not understand nor accept immortality except on condition of self-remembrance.”

“Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.”

“You see, Mademoiselle, I have experience, I know the world. To pass the time, why don't you ask every passenger to tell you his life's story? And if there is a single one among them who has never cursed his life, who has not often told himself that he was the unhappiest of men, then you may throw me overboard, headfirst!”

“We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world.”

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”

“Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“Happiness is not the portion of man.”

“There are two things for which animals are to be envied: they know nothing of future evils, or of what people say about them.”

“We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.”

“We never really know and the very fact that there are such words in the language as disappointment, regret, etc., is testimony to the pervasiveness and persistence of this feature of the human condition.”

“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.”

“For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.”

“We walk alone in the world.”

“Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they men?”

“Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?”

“How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.”

“We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.”

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

“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.”

“All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn't matter if you have a beautiful face or not.”