Human Centered Quotes & Sayings

No one can find inner peace except by working, not in a self- centered way, but for the whole human family. — Peace Pilgrim

I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal. — Jaron Lanier

We've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy
all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics
many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy. — Gloria Steinem

This is what is intended by education as a help to life; an education from birth that brings about a revolution: a revolution that eliminates every violence, a revolution in which everyone will be attracted towards a common center. Mothers, fathers, statesmen all will be centered upon respecting and aiding this delicate construction which is carried on in psychic mystery following the guide of an inner teacher. This is the new shining hope for humanity. It is not so much a reconstruction, as an aid to the construction carried out by the human soul as it is meant to be, developed in all the immense potentialities with which the new-born child is endowed. — Maria Montessori

Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. — Erich Fromm

When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity. — Valerie Tarico

Many people think that when we practice agriculture, nature is helping us in our efforts to grow food. This is an exclusively human-centered viewpoint ... we should instead, realize that we are receiving that which nature decides to give us. A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being. The farmer has very little influence over that process ... other than being there and doing his or her small part. — Masanobu Fukuoka

Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual's uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person's life. The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of every person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism. — Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Horizontal (human-centered) grief is much less concerned with being broken and more concerned with being busted. — Matt Chandler

We should be working to live, not living to work. We have created this "individualistic culture" were living to work has been centered around material gains. Working to live is a better approach because it emphasis on the human experiences and the condition of living. — Henry Johnson Jr

Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the "skin-encapsulated ego." Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth. — Huston Smith

For Saddam, the slave of his stepfather, these desires all centered around one thing: limitless power over others. In his brain the idea presumably took shape that he could regain the human dignity he had been so radically deprived of only by possessing the same power over others that his stepfather had over him. Throughout his childhood, there were no other ideals, no other examples to live up to, only the omnipotent stepfather and himself, the defenseless victim of the terror inflicted on him. It was in line with this pattern that the adult Hussein later organized the structure of the country he ruled over. His body knew nothing but violence. Every — Alice Miller

City wisdom became almost entirely centered on the problems of human relationships, in contrast to the wisdom of any natural tribal group, where relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world are still given due place. — James E. Lovelock

We seem to crave privilege, merited not by our works but by our birth, by the mere fact that, say, we are humans and born on Earth. We might call it the anthropocentric - the 'human-centered' - conceit. This conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God's image: The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe looks just like me. My, what a coincidence! How convenient and satisfying! — Carl Sagan

The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life. — Maria Montessori

Evangelicals tend to be "crucicentric," which means "centered on the cross." And we fail to see the comprehensive nature of Christ's work. As the early Christian bishop Irenaeus once argued, Christ moved through all stages of human life and experience and in this sense, recapitulated the life lived by humans. His holy obedience at every stage of human life created the possibility of a perfect humanity which he presented to the Father in his ascension. In his saving work, Jesus then became the author of a restored human race, something the world had never seen before. — Gary M. Burge

Because we have this whole other human being we have to think about other than ourselves. We had the luxury before of being totally self-centered. — Will Arnett

The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn't mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable. — Donald A. Norman

Racism springs from the lie that certain human beings are less than fully human. It's a self-centered falsehood that corrupts our minds into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want to be treated. — Alveda King

The survival instinct, however, is self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. "Original sin" was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life. Instead it was understood as the result of sinfulness and of disobedience. Atonement theology was born as a way to address this universal flaw in our understanding of human life. — John Shelby Spong

At that moment he understood, far better than he had before when he studied their histories and their political structures before he arrived, what it was to be human. Their whole existence was centered upon suffering. That was the first time he considered humanity's massive potential. They made frequent mistakes, yes, but if those mistakes were adequately painful they made every effort to avoid repeating them, to improve upon their errors. To be more careful so they didn't catch their thumb under the hammerhead. — Sean DeLauder

There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my strengths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being. — Haruki Murakami

In a human development sense, our understanding of leadership has essentially "grown up" and moved past personal ego and a self-centered view of things. — Linda Fisher Thornton

Only the human heart can live in present moment awareness. The human mind cannot, because its essential nature is to ponder the past and plan the future. This is why all wise beings encourage us to go beyond the mind into the timeless, boundless transcendence of heart-centered awareness. — David Simon

I never want to end up being a self-centered, vain human being. — Taylor Swift

Solidarity with local communities lies at the heart of culture-centered public relations because it seeks to co-create local narratives that have otherwise been erased from the mainstream public spheres (de Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2008). Local voices offer entry points for co-creating narratives that have otherwise been erased. It is through the re-appropriation of the community as a site of resistance as opposed to a site of neoliberal governance that new meaning structures are articulated (Beverly, 2004a,b; Spivak, 1988a,b; Tihuwai Smith, 2006). It is through these new meanings narrated at local community levels that the scientific modernist discourses of neoliberalism are disrupted. For instance, to the large-scale funding of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) with the goal of mapping — Krishnamurthy Sriramesh

Every type of evil we've got in us is the result of that one true illness of the human mind - that is, of being self-centered. — Wojciech Kurtyka

Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells. — George Lucas

Whatever the circumstances of a child's early life, and whatever the history and current state of that child, every human has the built-in power to improve, to change for the better, to significantly restore and often to recover. Tomorrow, that person you see in the mirror can be a stronger, more capable, livelier, more powerfully centered, and still-growing person. — Michael Merzenich

The cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies toward goodness ... are as innate as our tendencies toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both. — Warder Clyde Allee

The love for stories is sometimes portrayed as a self-centered, individualistic concern. But if story-grip stems primarily from an interest in other lives, then those who love stories will be the least egocentric. They know that there are too many other human paths that are equally or more interesting. Perhaps, then, a distaste for fiction is a sign of self-centeredness. — Douglas M. Jones III

Bureaucratic regimentation was in fact part of the larger regimentation of life, introduced by this power-centered culture. Nothing emerges more clearly from the Pyramid Texts themselves, with their wearisome repetitions of formulae, than a colossal capacity for enduring monotony: a capacity that anticipates the peak of universal boredom achieved in our own day. This verbal compulsiveness is the psychal side of the systematic general compulsion that brought the labor machine into existence. Only those who were sufficiently docile to endure this regimen-or sufficiently infantile to enjoy it-at every stage from command to execution could become efficient units in the human machine. — Lewis Mumford

The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone — Stephen Hawking

I believe that it is the task of social science to produce nuanced and people-centered forms of knowledge, correcting asymmetries of information and helping to promote, to the best of our ability, informed consent, human protection, and safety in medical and research settings. — Adriana Petryna

God forgive the church of Jesus Christ for trading its birthright access to the transcendent for the pot of stew that is horizontal helpfulness. How shortsighted and human centered. The outcome of this disaster is that we have created a Creator in our own image who weeps, cares, and longs to help, but in the end we doubt He can because we have made Him so much like ourselves. In making God our buddy, we find Him nice for cuddling but not much help when the hurricane comes. — James MacDonald

It's self-centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity. — John Templeton

Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. — Steven Pinker

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love. — Iris Murdoch

Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faith of the entire human race. I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American. — Douglas MacArthur

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of (our) total being. They all are united in the act of faith. — Paul Tillich

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain. — Daniel Keyes

Anxiety is always a gap between the way things are and the way we think they ought to be. Anxiety is something that stretches between the real and unreal. Our human desire is to avoid what's real and instead to be with our ideas about the world:
"I'm terrible." "You're terrible." "You're wonderful." The idea is separated from reality and anxiety is the gap between the idea and the reality that things are just as they are.
When we cease to believe in the object that we've created
which is off to one side of reality, so to speak
things snap back to the center. That's what being centered means. The anxiety then fades out. — Charlotte Joko Beck

Society nowadays tells people that their happiness is all that matters but happiness is never found if it costs someone else's theirs. That is not what happiness is, nor would such a person deserve it, because happiness is forged by the setting aside of self and in doing for others to make them happy first and foremost, so if you have to hurt another human being to "find your happiness," then you have no clue what the word actually means or what it's willing to do, and in being so self-centered and entitled, it's veritably tragic that the only care and concern you have is for yourself. — Donna Lynn Hope

Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you. — Mother Teresa

Love implies great freedom - not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered. These are not ideals. If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. And without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict. Then love is the essence of virtue. And a mind that is not in a state of love is not a religious mind at all. And it is only the religious mind that is freed from problems, and that knows the beauty of love and truth. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. — Carl Sagan

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. — Stanislaw Ulam

Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity? — Christina Engela

Sometimes I wonder if there is really goodwill in the world to worry about saving human beings, or whether we are just using that as camouflage for our own interests, the self-centered drive for more profits. — Enele Sopoaga

Liars are highly unlikely to admit their lies, never mind apologize for the hurt they've caused. Liars don't genuinely apologize. Deceit has become their full-out lifestyle. They are centered on themselves with no thoughts of the consequences of their lies. In cowardly style, they tell more lies to try and cover their tracks. They are not good at admitting they actually have shortcomings. — Cathy Burnham Martin

To aid and abet in the destruction of a single species or in the extermination of a single tribe is to commit a crime against God, a mortal sin against Mother Nature. Better by far to sacrifice in some degree the interests of mechanical civilization, curtail our gluttonous appetite for things, ever more things, learn to moderate our needs, and most important, and not difficult, learn to control, limit and gradually reduce our human numbers. We humans swarm over the planet like a plague of locusts, multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and babies. The man-centered view of the world in anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinature, antilife, and
antihuman. — Edward Abbey

People, especially the young, wanted to hear about God and not man. — Billy Graham

Reality is God-centered and all human beings are worshipers, whether or not they are conscious of this reality and its implications. — James MacDonald

Neither parenting, Christian education, heritage, nor fine church involvement can alter anyone's essential sin nature. To lie, make self-centered choices, be destructive, or be deeply hurtful to oneself or others may be "out of character," but it is not outside of any human being's nature. — Rick Horne

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered. — Joyce Meyer

A usable design starts with careful observations of how the tasks being supported are actually performed, followed by a design process that results in a good fit to the actual ways the tasks get performed. The technical name for this method is task analysis. The name for the entire process is human-centered design (HCD), discussed — Donald A. Norman

Wilderness travel can be extremely taxing and dangerous. You can fall into a crevasse, flip your kayak, lose your way, become hypothermic, run out of food, or be killed by a bear. Far less violent events, however, are the common experience of most people who travel in wild landscapes. A sublime encounter with perhaps the most essential attribute of wilderness - falling into resonance with a system of unmanaged, non-human-centered relationships - can be as fulfilling as running a huge and difficult rapid. Sometimes they prove, indeed, to be the same thing. — Barry Lopez

At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction) — Michel Parry

At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered. — John Polkinghorne

Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied. — Gary Hamel

My uncomfortable duty as a Christian is to confess the truth, so lethal to our self-centered human nature: 'Jesus, who suffered your sin unto his own death, calls you likewise to forgive, so that God's purposes may be accomplished in both you and your offender. — Gordon Dalbey

Shaping the fourth industrial revolution to ensure that it is empowering and human-centered, rather than divisive and dehumanizing, is not a task for any single stakeholder or sector or for any one region, industry or culture. The fundamental and global nature of this revolution means it will affect and be influenced by all countries, economies, sectors and people. It is, therefore, critical that we invest attention and energy in multistakeholder cooperation across academic, social, political, national and industry boundaries. These interactions and collaborations are needed to create positive, common and hope-filled narratives, enabling individuals and groups from all parts of the world to participate in, and benefit from, the ongoing transformations. — Klaus Schwab

Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it's not a onetime thing; it's an iterative process. — Melinda Gates

My single greatest challenge is to remain centered and loving in an overwhelmingly nonvegan world. In today's world, cruelty and exploitation of other beings - human and non-human alike - are accepted, practiced, and profited from by most every institution of society - from commerce and science to education and entertainment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Homo sapiens are either unaware of the cruelty or accept it as unavoidable and even normal. — Michael Klaper

Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain. When I was retarded I had lots of — Daniel Keyes

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. — Carl Sagan