Quotes & Sayings About Human Condition

Moira wished she spoke better Russian so that she could talk to Tekla about her ideas regarding appearance and grooming. The facial scars put her well outside the norms of feminine beauty and she had doubled down by electing to keep the buzz cut. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she was, to put it bluntly, kind of hot. Moira hated to say it. But hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist. — Neal Stephenson

I'm interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles, and indeed sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition. — Thomas Moore

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition. — Wendell Berry

We like to believe that, in our lifetime, the human condition is improving. — Nick Clooney

The opulence of Wilde is a bit too florid for Sherlock, who is a much darker character, ... fascinated by the human condition, but also overwhelmed by it. — Rupert Everett

common sense observations of human behavior support a similar dissociation in reasoning abilities which cuts in both directions. We all know persons who are exceedingly clever in their social navigation, who have an unerring sense of how to seek advantage for themselves and for their group, but who can be remarkably inept when trusted with a nonpersonal, nonsocial problem. The reverse condition is just as dramatic: We all know creative scientists and artists whose social sense is a disgrace, and who regularly harm themselves and others with their behavior. The absent-minded professor is the benign variety of the latter type. At work, in these different personality styles, are the presence or absence of what Howard Gardner has called "social intelligence," or the presence or absence of one or the other of his multiple intelligences such as the "mathematical. — Antonio R. Damasio

Being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth - that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the — Leo Tolstoy

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men. — Jack Vance

Pseudo idealism: apparent charitable behaviour that on scrutiny is revealed as selfish, because the giver is engaging in it only so that he or she can feel good about him or herself — Jeremy Griffith

Nobody else can be a better critic of yours than your enemy, who hates you to the core.
He will speculate your work minutely to find out your mistakes to let you down, the more he lets you down, the more you will excel.
And your true victory will be the day he praises your work.
The only condition is, you have to be negatively positive and positively negative to provide the comments and compliments, a space in your heart and mind, respectively. — Himmilicious

That is the dignity of America, the reason she exists, the condition of her survival, yes, the ultimate test of her greatness: to respect every human person, especially the weak and most defenseless ones, those as yet unborn. — Pope John Paul II

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. — Theodore Dalrymple

The mystery of being human and, certainly, of being a Catholic lies in our embracing together the imperfect state known as the human condition. First and foremost, if we could ever be perfect or do things perfectly, we would eliminate mystery, an essential ingredient in the good life and the spiritual life. — Eugene Kennedy

Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third - his mind's - on the human condition. ... — Carl Sagan

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many ... , myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy. — James Q. Wilson

I'm a Christian because Christianity names and addresses sin. It acknowledges the reality that the evil we observe in the world is also present within ourselves. It tells the truth about the human condition - that we're not okay. — Rachel Held Evans

Have always found it to be one of the more intriguing idiosyncrasies of the human condition that a problem that is handled quickly and effectively will almost always serve to generate more long-term customer loyalty than when the original service was delivered satisfactorily. — Richard Branson

We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need. — Robert Neelly Bellah

I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it. — Lloyd Alexander

I think all these great comforts that come from the human condition of trying to make things easier on ourselves also have these pitfalls, where things become so easy that we forget how enjoyable building a fence can be. — Nick Offerman

In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition. — William A. Dembski

There is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are. — Esther Hicks

I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that it was abnormal for people NOT to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me. — Eugene Ionesco

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of others those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. — Blaise Pascal

In every aspect of life, purity and holiness, cleanliness and refinement, exalt the human condition ... Even in the physical realm, cleanliness will conduce to spirituality. — Abdu'l- Baha

If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not. — Anthony Daniels

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition! — Joyce Carol Oates

Our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. — Roger Scruton

I'm human, It's a terminal condition — C.D. Reiss

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. — Kealan Patrick Burke

All choices have consequences,' she said []. 'That doesn't mean we're not free to make them. It's one of the perplexities of the human condition — Ingrid Black

We generally think of atherosclerosis as a condition of the heart, but it's been described as "an omnipresent pathology that involves virtually the entire human organism."68 You have blood vessels in every one of your organs, including your brain. — Michael Greger

People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both. — Karen Armstrong

The "human condition" is always to push forward for the better and economics is the study of that process. — Brian Wesbury

Every person lives bounded by the structural formation of human anatomy and the provincial demands of the human condition. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world. — David Hurn

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect. — Flann O'Brien

We all intuitively know that a mother's love is crucial to the creation of a well-adjusted human and that we are all born with an instinctive expectation of receiving unconditionally selfless love from our mother. — Jeremy Griffith

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. — Janet Fitch

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way. — Steven Rinella

But are you finding monastic history a very compelling reason to live?"
"I'm not human," he said. "I don't require a reason to live. Living is my default condition."
I couldn't help it; I laughed, and teas weleld in my eyes. That answer was quintessentially Orma, distilled to his elemental Orma-ness. — Rachel Hartman

Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, and thirst ... But me and you, we don't have to feel them things ... We can turn off the human condition.
So maybe we're closer to the angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.
The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we're capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong. — Daniel H. Wilson

It is my growing conviction that my life belongs to others just as much as it belongs to myself and that what is experienced as most unique often proves to be most solidly embedded in the common condition of being human. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Globalization has considerably accelerated in recent years following the dizzying expansion of communications and transport and the equally stupefying transnational mergers of capital. We must not confuse globalization with "internationalism" though. We know that the human condition is universal, that we share similar passions, fears, needs and dreams, but this has nothing to do with the "rubbing out" of national borders as a result of unrestricted capital movements. One thing is the free movement of peoples, the other of money. — Eduardo Galeano

[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. — Steve Toltz

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds and its very self. — Kafka, Franz

The growth of entrepreneurial classes throughout the world is an asset in the promotion of human rights and individual liberty, and it should be understood and used as such. Yet peace is the first and most important condition for continued prosperity and freedom. America's military power must be secure because the United States is the only guarantor of global peace and stability. The current neglect of America's armed forces threatens its ability to maintain peace. — Condoleezza Rice

there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The — Pearl S. Buck

The agony of being unable to answer the question of why are we the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of life. It has been our species' particular affliction or condition - our human condition. — Jeremy Griffith

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change. — Tony Kushner

Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition, that's where life starts, that's where you start feeling yourself living. — Philippe Petit

Suffering is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. It is written in the human script. — Johnny Rich

I am drawn to people that are not going to shy away from the very dark, scary stuff of the human condition and in a lot of cases people need alcohol or drugs to create poetry and poetic pose that can take you so far out there where you are still able to recognize yourself and then to bring you back home where you're not the same person you were when you left. — Anne Lamott

Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work. — Thom Mayne

I think because of these big issues of life and death that maybe sex feels like a crass question. But for Christ sake, this is a book that is so interested in an elemental human condition. And one of the ideas about surrender is an erotic surrender, too. These folks are surrendered by destiny; they surrender to each other in certain moments, but there is a lot of erotic surrender. — Chang-rae Lee

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. — Scott Lynch

For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence. — George Clayton Johnson

Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways. — George Pattison

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil. — Albert Camus

There are no bystanders in life [ ... ] Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves. — Sonia Sotomayor

The silence of those in positions of influence in the church who know, or have a strong suspicion, that being gay is a nonpathological minority variant in the human condition drives me crazy, far crazier than I am driven by any loud-mouthed purveyor of hateful nonsense. — James Alison

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions. — Parker J. Palmer

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human
condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character. — James Hillman

Experiencing differences is crucial to the human condition. Especially when that difference is over the head, blower powder. — Ernest Hemingway,

Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature. — Nocturnus Libertus

I have resolved to demonstrate by a certain and undoubted course of argument, or to deduce from the very condition of human nature, not what is new and unheard of, but only such things as
agree best with practice. — Baruch Spinoza

I've seen it all in Nevada, Kansas before that, and the War of Northern Aggression before that. People do all sorts of nasty things. And while I used to believe that there was something profoundly wrong about the human condition - sin passed on from the first man and that only the grace of God in Jesus Christ could make everything right, the standard explanation in churches Mormon to Methodist - it didn't take me long to learn that Christians and non-Christians, women and men, young and old were all capable of doing the worse things a human being might imagine, and then some.

From my upcoming novel, BATHHOUSE ROW, (available this fall). — Gregg Edwards Townsley

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Does truth lie in the everyday events, the daily incidents, in the pettiness and vulgarity most people's lives are compounded of, or does the truth have its abode in the dream it is given us to dream to flee our sad human condition? — Jorge Amado

Highway One, Antarctica is a wonderful debut by a writer with razor-sharp insights to the human condition. Justin Herrmann is a voice I hope to hear more from, and soon. Excellent collection. — Jo-Ann Mapson

The Human Condition has a vacancy ... a transient declaring It's Self The Victor! Till death do us part in This War for human isolation. — Rosemarie Yusen

Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here. — Zack Love

To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do. — Beverly Jenkins

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition. — W. H. Auden

Human life is designed as a self-study program.
Existence is always one undivided. It is what we often call the Light. It is a pure consciousness of unconditional love. Out of the Light the idea of darkness is created. There is no existence of light and darkness, as separated energies. The separation is illusionary.
Experiencing ourselves as humans is an exploration of the greater Self in a localised condition.
A dense reality is created to facilitate the idea of forgetfulness.
Now we collectively entered a new time of remembering. It is not necessary anymore to create the illusion of self-disconnection from the energy source. — Raphael Zernoff

She patted him on the arm. "You're fucked up, Mister. But you're cool."
"I believe that's what they call the human condition," said Shadow. — Neil Gaiman

The practice of patience toward one another, the overlooking of one another's defects, and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family, in the professions, and in society. — Lawrence G. Lovasik

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition. — Richard Dawkins

As long as greed, stupidity and cowardice remain a part of the human condition, there will be a constituency for Democrats. — Jack Kelly

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

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance. — Douglas Adams

We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach. — Charles Dickens

Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter. — Homer

Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call genius has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve. — Nathaniel Branden

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh. — Michel De Montaigne

The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago ... Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting. — Terence McKenna

The present day shows with appalling clarity how little able people are to let the other man's argument count, although this capacity is a fundamental and indispensable condition for any human community. Everyone who proposes to come to terms with himself must reckon with this basic problem. For, to the degree that he does not admit the validity of the other person, he denies the "other" within himself the right to exist - and vice versa. The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity. — C. G. Jung

To make a concrete response to the appeal of our brothers and sisters in humanity, we must come to grips with the first of these challenges: solidarity among generations, solidarity between countries and entire continents, so that all human beings may share more equitably in the riches of our planet. This is one of the essential services that people of good will must render to humanity. The earth, in fact, can produce enough to nourish all its inhabitants, on the condition that the rich countries do not keep for themselves what belongs to all. — Pope Benedict XVI

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition. — E. O. Wilson

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create. — Frank Herbert

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. — Erich Fromm

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. — Thomas Sowell

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. — Paulo Freire

Without a doubt, stem cell research will lead to the dramatic improvement in the human condition and will benefit millions of people. — Eli Broad

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer. — Voltaire

And above all, what a strange attitude that actually is, when we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it! It seems as if we want to be rewarded, not just with our own salvation, but most especially with other people's damnation - just like the workers hired in the first hour. That is very human, but the Lord's parable is particularly meant to make us quite aware of how profoundly un-Christian it is at the same time. Anyone who looks on the loss of salvation for others as the condition, as it were, on which he serves Christ will in the end only be able to turn away grumbling, because THAT kind of reward is contrary to the loving-kindness of God.
-What It Means To Be A Christian — Pope Benedict XVI

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite. — Barbara Cassin

That the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit - this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son - was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell. — Elena Ferrante

It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress. — Victor Hugo