Fascination Human Quotes & Sayings

Perfect concordance among reformers is not to be expected; and men who are honestly struggling towards the light cannot hope to attain at one bound to the complete truth. There is always a danger lest the fascination of a new discovery should lead us too far. Men of science, being human, are apt, like lovers, to exaggerate the perfections and be a little blind to the faults of the object of their choice. — Thomas George Bonney

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat. — Graham Swift

This fascination with the human face has never left me ... Every face I see seems to hide and sometimes, fleetingly, to reveal the mystery of another human being ... Capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life. — Philippe Halsman

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature with such faultless accuracy. The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fibre and tendon and tissue of the human frame, represented in detail. It looked natural, because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way, unless his attention were occupied with some other matter. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it, now. I shall dream of it, sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs. — Mark Twain

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives ... he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer. — Jennifer Haigh

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion? — Stephen Jay Gould

Even now, after a lifetime of human companionship, I am hard-pressed to understand fully mankind's fascination with those little marks that they so carefully impress on sheets of paper. — Sally Smith O'Rourke

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects. — Edgar Ramirez

I can only really speak for myself and what I've noticed in my kids and the people in my life, but because dinosaurs were real, and yet they seem so fantastical, is why they held such a huge fascination for me as a child. They're so different from human beings. — Bryce Dallas Howard

I can watch anybody all day long if they're really doing what they're doing. I have a fascination with human behavior, watching people talk, when they pick at their face or how they hold their hand or if they're listening to you, if they're not listening to you. — Scoot McNairy

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence. Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and color in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams, and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.
But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom ... — Anais Nin

A short-lived fascination with another person may be exciting-I think we've all seen people aglow, in a state of being "in love with love"-but such an attraction is not sustainable over the long run. Paradoxically, human love is sanctified not in the height of attraction and enthusiasm, but in the everyday struggles of living with another person. It is not in romance but in routine that the possibilities for transformation are made manifest. And that requires commitment. — Kathleen Norris

I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements. — Sheryl Lee

As for me, I preferred to let people believe what they wanted to believe. It made life far more interesting. But my fascination with human behavior was one I kept to myself, — Laurelin Paige

I have always had a fascination about what's inside a human being. — Hideo Kojima

I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ... " & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye. — David Mitchell

My heart gave a weird little flutter. I'd been around Lexi for over a month, listening to her gush over boys, watching her point out the "gorgeous" ones. I understood human beauty now, and I'd even reached the point where I could nudge Lexi toward a cute guy, and she would agree that he was hot, but I still didn't get the fascination.
Maybe all the boy-watching had finally sunk in, because this stranger was, to use two of Lexi's favorite words, absolutely gorgeous. — Julie Kagawa

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists. — Werner Heisenberg

Beyond the fact that it is a limitless arena for the full play of human nature, there is no sure accounting for golf's fascination ... Perhaps it is nothing more than the best game man has ever devised. — Herbert Wind

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination. — Michael Leunig

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing. — Douglas Adams

My fascination is not for cinema; it's for human nature and human beings because I find it quite difficult being one at times. — Paddy Considine

She tapped her chest. "No, I'm not a freak, okay, so could you stop pressuring me."
Rafael muttered something under his breath, throwing up his hands in surrender. "So what am I? What's Karhl, Jayani, my brother, and all the BaSatai? Are we all freaks? Just
because this human has some kind of fascination with labeling you, you believe in it. Be your own person, Armani, not what someone else says you are. — Suzan Battah

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion - but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led. — Alex Haley

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing - by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature. — M.H. Abrams

Technology is a wonderful tool, but also if used incorrectly a horrible tool. We're fascinated by all aspects of it, whatever makes our human lives easier on the planet, but eventually there will have to be some sort of merger. The fascination isn't going to die down. — Reggie Watts

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This "homebrew" scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online - even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form. — Nick Montfort

The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power. There is something about him that seems to radiate out to others and to melt them into his aura, a "fascinating effect," as Christine Olden called it, of "the narcissistic personality"3 or, as Jung preferred to call him, the "mana-personality. — Ernest Becker

I think, however, the current fascination with the computer and its principal product, information, deserves a more critical response. This is because the computer does so ingeniously mimic human intelligence that it may significantly shake our confidence in the uses of the mind. And it is the mind that must think about all things, including the computer. — Theodore Roszak

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination. — Elizabeth Kostova

Then Toohey moved through the crowd, and smiled at his friends. But between smiles and sentences, his eyes went back to the man with the orange hair. He looked at the man as he looked occasionally at the pavement from a window on the thirtieth floor, wondering about his own body were it to be hurled down and what would happen when it struck against that pavement. He did not know the man's name, his profession or his past; he had no need to know; it was not a man to him, but only a force; Toohey never saw men. Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that particular force so explicitly personified in a human body. — Ayn Rand

The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment. — Anais Nin

Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated. — Victor Hugo

The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present use to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium ... -contemptibly small compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture. — Henry Jacob Bigelow

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me. — Louis Auchincloss