Human Affair Quotes & Sayings

No man can possibly be benevolent or religious, to the full extent of his obligations, without concerning himself, to a greater or less extent, with the affairs of human government. — Charles Grandison Finney

There is no simplistic approach to worthwhile achievement in human affairs. — William H. Hastie

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all. — Hannah Arendt

In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions. — Eric Hoffer

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart? — Robin Hobb

The archives recall not one single incriminating incident, not one drunken escapade, not one reported affair, not one spat with a team-mate or reporter - As Matthew Parris wondered of Barack Obama in these pages recently, is he human? — Michael Atherton

The human race is but a monotonous affair. Most ofthemlabour the greater part oftheir time for mere subsistence; and the scanty portion of freedomwhich remains to themso troubles themthat they use every exertion to get rid ofit. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The atomic bombs will surely shorten the war, and let us hope that they will effectively end war as a possibility in human affairs. — Ernest Lawrence

In all human affairs, the wisest course is to be passionate about the role of reason and reasonable about the role of passion. — Mardy Grothe

I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom. — Lin Yutang

The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable to human affairs, and in this as in other things, we may say here that he who is not for us is against us; he would gathereth not with us scattereth. — Abraham Lincoln

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs
but a tribute nevertheless. — George Steiner

He was born of a human-fungal love affair that shook the court of Onddo. His mother was a human, a princess of the court, by the name of 'Agatha'. His father was the notorious pirate captain, AGARICUS AUGUSTUS - THE PRINCE. — Orrin Grey

Biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well ... Thus Christians are committed to hunger for righteousness in the whole human community as something pleasing to a righteous God. — John Stott

A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair - a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its parts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases. — Mortimer J. Adler

I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act, — Akbar Ganji

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is a happy circumstance in human affairs that evils which are not cured in one way will cure themselves in some other. — Thomas Jefferson

Opinion, whether well or ill-founded, is the governing principle of human affairs — Alexander Hamilton

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. — Chad Harbach

[Only by] the good influence of our conduct may we bring salvation in human affairs; or like a fatal comet we may bring destruction in our train. — Desiderius Erasmus

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy - the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy - had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Afterwards, — Kai Bird

The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart . . . the refusal to look up to God as our father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery. — John Eldredge

But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom. — Peter Robinson

Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until she was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity. — David Nicholls

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. — George Santayana

If it be taught that all who are born have a right to support on the land, whatever be their number, and that there is no occasion to exercise any prudence in the affair of marriage so as to check this number, the temptations, according to all the known principles of human nature, will inevitably be yielded to, and more and more will gradually become dependent on parish assistance. — Thomas Malthus

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair" ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? — Salman Rushdie

Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety. — Plato

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs. — Isaac Barrow

Is this a negative perspective? The stance of a victim? No, It is a statement of truth. The way it is for a woman who refuses to be cast aside without protest. Who has the courage to bare her face and her heart to the reality of her partner's infidelity. Who will now accept and tolerate nothing but the truth.

Will she falter? Will she hide? Will she feel she can't go on? Of course she will. She is human. That is what is so real about her and what is so beautiful about her, even in her grief, and in her rage. — Meryn G. Callander

Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere." The human race is but a monotonous affair. Most of them labour the greater part of their time for mere subsistence; and the scanty portion of freedom which remains to them so troubles them that they use every exertion to get rid of it. Oh, the destiny of man! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

GLOBAL WHITE HAIR LIFE AFFAIR'S EXPERIENCED ELDERS,PARENTS AND SOCIETY WELL-WISHER'S HAVE TO DO ASSIST&SUGGEST OUR GLOBAL YOUTH TO WED WITH SUITABLE PARTNER TO SETTLE IN LIFE LATE TENURE.EVEN THOUGH, THEY ALL ARE WELL EDUCATED AND ECONOMICALLY SOUND IN HIGH CIRCLES DRIVE MOVE AROUND THE GLOBAL ACTIVITIES 24/7 IT IS AN UN-FORTUNATE LIFE SHOCK . HOWEVER, UNIVERSAL TIME IS RUNNING VERY FAST DAY BY DAY.SO, ALL LIFE ENJOYED SCHOLAR'S ,RETIRED HUMAN GOD SOUL'S HAVE TO DO SOMETHING MAGIC-STICK WONDER TO PLEASE OUR DEAREST INNOCENT LIFE ENACT JUNIOR'S OF PRESENT WORLYOUNG GENERATION OF 21ST.CENTURY. — Various

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We dedicate this book to the 239 people who lost their lives on MH370 on March 8, 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. One of our purposes in writing the book was, in some small way to convey the human stories from the tragedy. We hope we have done this without adding upset to the terrible toll relatives and friends are already facing. Our other, more important task was to pursue the truth about what exactly happened. That is one small contribution we feel we can make to this whole terrible affair. — Ewan Wilson

Fortune moulds and circumscribes human affairs as she pleases.
[Lat., Fortuna humana fingit artatque ut lubet.] — Plautus

These are not vague inferences ... but they are solid conclusions drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs. — Alexander Hamilton

Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America's Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro. — Armando Valladares

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. — Terry Eagleton

It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it be, pays any regard to human affairs. — Pliny The Elder

It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow. — Anthony Daniels

There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. — Albert Einstein

And thus is the affair of our redemption ordered, that thereby we are brought to an immensely more exalted kind of union with God, and enjoyment of him, both the Father and the Son, than otherwise could have been. For Christ being united to the human nature, we have advantage for a more free and full enjoyment of him, than we could have had if he had remained only in the divine nature. So again, we being united to a divine person, as his members, can have a more intimate union and intercourse with God the Father, who is only in the divine nature, than otherwise could be. Christ who is a divine person, by taking on him our nature, descends from the infinite distance and height above us, and is brought nigh to us; whereby we have advantage for the full enjoyment of him. And, on the other hand, we, by being in Christ a divine person, do as it were ascend up to God, through the infinite distance, and have hereby advantage for the full enjoyment of him also. — Jonathan Edwards

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane. — Kate Millett

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs. — Enoch Powell

I think in the heart of every human being there burns an ember of hope that warmly entices us to believe everything will eventually come together into one perfect day, and that potentially the hours in this day will stretch on indefinitely. And so we live our lives in hopeful anticipation, dreaming and praying to reach this wondrous day, while in the process we miss out on the anxious affair that life truly is. Life is not perfection; it is everything else. We must taste and experience heartaches and trials in order to feel the genuine joy that comes from enduring them well. We then move on, wiser and more capable of charity - this being pure love and the reason for life's trials altogether. — Richelle E. Goodrich

In all crises of human affairs there are two broad courses open to a man. He can stay where he is or he can go elsewhere. — P.G. Wodehouse

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product. — Eric Hoffer

Quantum est in rebus inane! How much folly there is in human affairs. — Aulus Persius Flaccus

Tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. — Hugh Howey

The pursuit of natural knowledge, the investigation of the world - mental and material - in which we live, is not a dull and spiritless affair: rather is it a voyage of adventure of the human mind, a holiday for reckless and imaginative souls. — Archibald Hill

As a child, my own mother told me the human heart spun on an axis smaller than a dime. Like her father, she sold "life for love" insurance. For the price of ten years off your life, you could purchase insurance on a ten-year love affair. Plans were also available in increments of twenty-five and fifty. If your love affair failed before your insurance expired, they'd provide you with a clone of the loved one for the duration of the term. Sometimes the clone worked out even better than the original. — Miranda Mellis

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals. — Storm Jameson

She dealt her pretty words like Blades
How glittering they shone
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone
She never deemed
she hurt
That
is not Steel's Affair
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh
How ill the Creatures bear
To Ache is human
not polite
The Film upon the eye
Mortality's old Custom
Just locking up
to Die. — Emily Dickinson

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept. — A.S. Byatt

I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing was only a residue. A man didn't have to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong he'd feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came. — Charles Bukowski

Love is just a peculiar, fleeting affair that isn't very important, but in marriage there is always hostility between two different tribes of human beings. There are two opposing forces, who fight each other until one of them wins, and you and I, my poor old Alain, have been knocked out too easily. — Irene Nemirovsky

We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person's defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover
a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability? — Alexander McCall Smith

There is no evil in human affairs that has not some good mingled with it.
[It., Non e male alcuno nelle cose umane che non abbia congiunto seco qualche bene.] — Francesco Guicciardini

The issue of gay is at the heart of the human rights struggle. The decision of two consenting male adults to engage in marital affair should be a personal decision and not the decision of the state inasmuch as their relationship does not infringe on the rights of another. The state should mind its business and let the individual's mind theirs — Tony Osborg

Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. — Aulus Persius Flaccus

War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely. — Woodrow Wilson

Wisdom is an affair of values, and of value judgments. It is intelligent conduct of human affairs. — Sidney Hook

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad. — Herbert Spencer

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof. — Walter Lippmann

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation
which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about. — John Wyndham

I still couldn't stop the sick feeling rising in my stomach. "This could be a disaster."
"How? If anyone even finds it - and it's not just sitting under a table right now - they'll just have a good laugh at our sappy talk. No one's going to be like, 'Aha! Proof of an illicit human-and-vampire affair. — Richelle Mead

Do not confuse notoriety and fame with greatness ... For you see, greatness is a measure of one's spirit, not a result of one's rank in human affairs. — Sherman Glenn Finesilver

Gardening is a cooperative affair. I am a part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt, rocks and a human family participate collectively in a love affair with place. — Jim Nollman

Christ does not fulfill the human element, but he certainly fulfills every other need in your life. As far as I'm concerned, there's no better love affair. — Gloria Gaynor

As one might guess, I was easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body--toilet business not least of all. The very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe. Any function of the body that one hid behind closed doors titillated me. I recall one of my early relationships--not a heavy love affair, just a light one--was with a Russian man with a wonderful sense of humor who permitted me to squeeze the pus from his pimples on his back and shoulders. To me, this was the greatest intimacy. Before that, still young and neurotic, just allowing a man to listen to me urinate was utter humiliation, torture, and therefore, I thought, proof of profound love and trust — Ottessa Moshfegh