The Human Condition Quotes

1. "Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision.It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed SOMETIMES, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer--you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted."
Author: Chad Harbach

4. "To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes."
Author: Dan Simmons

5. "On an individual level, the human condition changed day by day, even hour by hour, and while you were soaking in self-pity over a misfortune, you might miss an opportunity for a redeeming triumph. And for every act of inhumanity, the species managed to committ a hundred acts of kindness; so if you were the type to brood, you would be more sensible if you dwelt on the remarkable goodwill with which most people treated others even in a society where the cultural elites routinely mocked virtue and celebrated brutality.BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOONChapter 5"
Author: Dean Koontz

6. "I like real problems, the human condition - twisted, darker stuff."
Author: Drea De Matteo

7. "Overall, it seems now possible to draw a reasonably good explanation of why the human condition is a singularity, why the likes of it has occurred only once and took so long in coming. The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of the evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right. Each has required a particular sequence of one or more preadaptations that occurred previously. Homo sapiens is the only species of large mammal – thus large enough to evolve a human-sized brain – to have made every one of the required lucky turns in the evolutionary maze. (45)"
Author: Edward O. Wilson

8. "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."
Author: Eugene Ionesco

9. "I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs."
Author: Glenn Hughes

10. "Things change all the time, and they'll probably never be the same again. It's just the natural evolution of the human condition. Things change, and whatever it is is what it is. I mean, you try to start second guessing that, you either get rich or die broke."
Author: Guy Clark

11. "The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity."
Author: Hermann Hesse

12. "It's the basic truth of the human condition: everybody lies."
Author: House

13. "Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same."
Author: Hugh Hardy

14. "I have a real issue with anyone trying to protect children from their own imaginations. If we cannot acknowledge that a lot of us have a bit of darkness within ourselves, some more than others perhaps, and bring it into the light and examine it and talk about this part of the human condition, then I think we will be living in quite a dangerous climate. I think that's much more damaging for children."
Author: J.K. Rowling

15. "You learn stuff from every character you play about the human condition that can be quite enlightening."
Author: Jacki Weaver

16. "The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other."
Author: Jane Yolen

17. "But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition.They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, auwesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us."
Author: Janet Fitch

18. "I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world's most perfect haiku."
Author: Jarod Kintz

19. "Gambling is part of the human condition. I love it. I have the best time gambling. I've been winning fortunes, and I've been losing them."
Author: Jerry Lewis

20. "...but everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask."
Author: Jill Lepore

21. "Why hadn't he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided realityby expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectationdivided by reality-you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to createoptimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, afraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zerowithout reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at anyprovocation."
Author: Jodi Picoult

22. "Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now."
Author: Joss Whedon

23. "Misogyny… is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it."
Author: Joss Whedon

24. "In its timeless capacity to embody the human condition, the vampire is a poignant metaphor describing the psychosocial experience of the pariah - the outsider. The vampire is the Other that used to be human. The diseased, the mentally challenged, the homeless and hungry, ......are all vampires in a way; the other who used to be human, the invisible who casts no reflection among us."
Author: Katherine Ramsland

25. "Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen."
Author: Kealan Patrick Burke

26. "I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness - and some happiness, if you're lucky."
Author: Kim Cattrall

27. "Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

28. "I look at life, the experiences I've had, at the human condition, the dynamics between people, the news (world news), and draw from the compelling realities all around us."
Author: Leslie Banks

29. "I can get my head turned by a good-looking guy as much as the next girl. But sexy doesn't impress me. Smart impresses me, strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I am impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration."
Author: Lisa Unger

30. "The promise of aspiration is that it is evolutionary. The human condition is such that we are always aspiring to be something more, something better, something nobler. It starts as a thought, a want, a need, or a desire and then grows and evolves with intention and direction, upward with lust and hunger. The continued drive feeds the rise."
Author: Lorii Myers

31. "We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa

32. "That's part of being an endurance athlete. Who in their right mind wouldn't find excuses to escape an hour or more of suffering? Excuses always lead to a reckoning. We find reasons not to take that first step out the door, just as we find ways to be - or not to be - our best. Weakness, doubt and fear are parts of the human condition. Facing them instead of fabricating an elaborate ruse to sidestep them - hoping to avoid them but ultimately carrying them in our hearts and minds and psyche until they whittle away at our being - gives us a direct route to hope and dreams. Along the way, we reap all those other by-products that make the suffering a tonic for our souls."
Author: Martin Duggard

33. "The obsessions we have are pretty much the same our whole lives. Mine are people, the human condition, life."
Author: Mary Ellen Mark

34. "[He] believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity."
Author: Max Brooks

35. "The human condition is not perfect. We are not perfect specimens, any of us. We're not robots."
Author: Michael Ovitz

36. "Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get."
Author: Miguel Syjuco

37. "I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence."
Author: Mordecai Richler

38. "As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse."
Author: N. Scott Momaday

39. "We humans may be brilliant and we may be special, but we are still connected to the rest of life. No one reminds us of this better than our dogs. Perhaps the human condition will always include attempts to remind ourselves that we are separate from the rest of the natural world. We are different from other animals; it's undeniably true. But while acknowledging that, we must acknowledge another truth, the truth that we are also the same. That is what dogs and their emotions give us-- a connection. A connection to life on earth, to all that binds and cradles us, lest we begin to feel too alone. Dogs are our bridge-- our connection wo who we really are, and most tellingly, who we want to be. When we call them home to us, it'as as if we are calling for home itself. And that'll do, dogs. That'll do."
Author: Patricia B. McConnell

40. "There must be possible a fiction which,leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."
Author: Ralph Ellison

41. "The law of centrifugal force seems to be as true for the human condition as it is for the Newtonian mechanics. The faster our lives spin, the more things tend to fly apart."
Author: Richard Paul Evans

42. "I don't think any human being/artist is 100% emotionally stable, based on the human condition and our emotions that relate to it."
Author: Sasha Grey

43. "Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?""The what?""The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition.""What is it?""He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that line is actually circular."
Author: Scott Lynch

44. "[At the scene of a murder]The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way."
Author: Shirley Rousseau Murphy

45. "Improving the human condition takes little effort; destroying it takes maximum force."
Author: T.F. Hodge

46. "It's an actor's job to play all the human conditions - light, dark, and medium."
Author: Tim Daly

47. "One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray."
Author: Tom Skerritt

48. "Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art."
Author: Tucker Max

49. "Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors."
Author: Voltaire

50. "He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman."
Author: Walker Percy

The Human Condition Quotes Pictures