Human Failing Quotes & Sayings

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. — Ralph Ellison

And if we fail? (Delphine) It'll suck to be human. (Madoc) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Permanent remorse about failing to do your human duty, in my opinion, can be worse than losing your life. — Miep Gies

The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own. — Gerhard Richter

Inflexibility is the worst human failing. You can learn to check impetuosity, overcome fear with confidence and laziness with discipline. But for rigidity of mind, there is no antidote. It carries the seeds of its own destruction. — Anton Myrer

My weakness consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental
for the externals,
no eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next mean. Next man
that's it. I have met so many men." he pursued, with momentary sadness
"met them too with a certain, certain impact, let us say; like this fellow, for instance
and in each case all I could see was merely a human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me
I can assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! It's a failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too indolent for whist
and a story ... " [p.44] — Joseph Conrad

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people. — Kenneth Lonergan

Ministry is not about helping these kids be better Christians; it is about helping them be what God created them to be-human. And it is the degradation of their humanity, brought about by broken and abusive families, violent neighborhoods, failing schools and poverty, that caused them to lash out so forcefully. Ministry is about suffering with them in their dehumanization, celebrating their human endeavors and in all things pointing to the true human, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Having — Andrew Root

You're not a bad person for having negative thoughts or feelings. You're not getting it wrong or failing in life. You're not less spiritual, less human, or less evolved for going through an emotional funk or for feeling stuck. At your core, you are a learning and growing being. And you are doing just that. — Emily Maroutian

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back? — Wilkie Collins

But, to love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves. — David George Haskell

When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing. — Jimmy Carter

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that "I am flawed and defective as a human being." Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding - exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can't be trusted. As an object that can't be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy. — John Bradshaw

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer. — Art Buchwald

If the heart of Africa remained elusive, my search for it had brought me closer to understanding myself and other human beings. The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. It impels mighty ambitions and dangerous capers. We amass great fortunes at the cost of our souls, or risk our lives in drug dens from London's Soho, to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. We shout in Baptist churches, wear yarmulkes and wigs and argue even the tiniest points in the Torah, or worship the sun and refuse to kill cows for the starving. Hoping that by doing these things, home will find us acceptable or failing that, that we will forget our awful yearning for it. — Maya Angelou

Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it it very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or the other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have other think of us. — Jane Austen

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing. — Daniel Taylor

Americans should know that Iranians are just as decent, human and rational as other human beings. Sadly, the mainstream media in the U.S. regularly fails to recognize and reflect this. — Mohammad Marandi

What human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had. — John Connolly

Somewhat predictably, I'm much more comfortable in front of an audience - and a big audience is even better - than faced with one stranger. This always seems like a bit of a failing on my part, as a human. I think that's also why I put myself situations where I'm forced to engage in other ways. — Miranda July

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences - all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey. — Richard Rohr

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help. Be not surprised when friends fail you; it is a failing world. Never reckon upon immutability in man: inconstancy you may reckon upon without fear of disappointment. — Charles Spurgeon

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail — Ludwig Von Mises

Love is fragile at best and often a burden or something that blinds us. It's fodder for poets and song writers and they build it into something beyond human capacity. Falling in love means enrolling yourself in the school of disappointment. Being human means failing each other often, and no two people fail each other more than two people who pledge to do things for each other that they'll never do because they are just incapable of it ... That's why art is enduring. The look of love or hope, or the look of compassion, bravery, whatever, is captured forever. We spend our lives trying to get someone to be as enduring as a painting or a sculpture and we can't because feelings crumble as quickly as the flesh. — V.C. Andrews

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good — Paul Kalanithi

1. The first is simply not to try to be clever. Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, if they are to attain any size and importance at all, by morons or near-morons. Incompetence, after all, is the only thing in abundant and never-failing supply. Anything too clever, whether in design or execution, is almost bound to fail. — Peter F. Drucker

Calamities that are not the result of purely natural phenomena usually have their origins, distant and obscure though they may be, in common human failings. — Aung San Suu Kyi

Faith will tell us Christ is present, When our human senses fail. — Thomas Aquinas

Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can't fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be you. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing me. Even if the laws of the universe change on me, so that all my knowledge is void, I'll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It's not a Muggle thing, it's a human thing, it just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don't understand and ask 'Why? — Eliezer Yudkowsky

We should treat with indulgence every human folly,
failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have
before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I don't even want to win, but I think there's this survival instinct inside all of us that clicks on when we see other people failing. It makes me feel gross and incredibly human. — Julie Murphy

Yet her father had taught her that failing to act in the face of human suffering is inhuman. — Corban Addison

One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying. — Robert Buettner

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems. — David Bornstein

From a leader's perspective, the most serious betrayal has to do with thwarting human potential, with quenching the spirit, with failing to deal equitably with each other as human beings. — Max De Pree

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes. — George Soros

The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [ ... ] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally. — Harlan Ellison

The human experience of weakness is God's blueprint for calling attention to the supremacy of his Son. When miserably failing people continue to belong to, believe in, and worship Jesus, God is happy. — Michael Spencer

Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery. — Dan Ariely

...one could argue that it is reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time - that have, in other words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable - are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect, even if it is accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject... We need only a sense of our own limited part in the whole human story to accept [this] presumption. It is only arrogance, or some analogous moral failing, that can deprive us of this. — Charles Taylor

A chronic failing of human beings, that we so rarely looked up. — Wildbow

It is a human failing, to attribute the best of motives to those we know the least, and the worst to those we love best. — Jacqueline Carey

For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice. — Judith Spencer

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. — Stephen Hawking

When does gold ore become gold? When it is put through a process of fire. So the human being during the training becomes as pure as gold through suffering. It is the burning away of the dross. Suffering has a great redeeming quality. As a drop of water failing on the desert sand is sucked up immediately, so we must become nothing and nowhere ... we must disappear. — Bhai Sahib Singh

You mean one human is good, but a hundred humans is bad?" "Exactly. One human is just a person. A hundred humans make a society. And societies have kings, and religions and priests, and all these other things serrin completely fail to understand — Joel Shepherd

The spirit of religious persecution is not the special failing of any particular faith, but springs eternal in the human breast. — Dion Fortune

What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them? — Jane Addams

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. — M. Scott Peck

No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who's ALWAYS had EVERYTHING work out for them with ZERO struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don't exist. — Chris Hardwick

what terrifies me most is how we
foam at the mouth with envy
when others succeed
but sigh in relief
when they are failing

our struggle to
celebrate each other is
what's proven most difficult
in being human — Rupi Kaur

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired. — Nancy Friday

The desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. p. xxxii — Eve Ensler

Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence ... faith. — Serj Tankian

Humans are really stupid. If we don't fall and get hurt, we won't learn our lesson. Just like a kid repeatedly falling.

No matter how many times we fail, or how many times we've fallen. Humans will stand once again, smiling ruefully at our grazed knees before continuing onwards. This time we will not run from our pain. — Yuuri Eda

We came from some place and we are trending in a particular direction. Without memories, we do not know where we come from, and we cannot project our future trajectory. Without a keen awareness of our history, we cannot pose any meaningful hypothesis or engage in any useful speculation regarding the future of humankind. Without knowing where humankind came from and failing to contemplate where humankind is going, we could never touch upon a comprehensive understanding of the mythology and mystery of human nature. Such a spectacle would preclude us from comprehending what it truly means to be human. Melodious memories assist us to feel in our bones what being actually entails in its full aesthetic splendor. — Kilroy J. Oldster

When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others. By dividing endlessly, or by failing to die properly, these cells can destroy the necessary balance that makes a living individual person. Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another. Like bullies who break cooperative societies, cancers behave in their own best interest until they kill their larger community, the human body. — Neil Shubin

Somehow, the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out the higher excellencies in another, and so they re-acted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor at all — Andrew Bird

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize ... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished. — Claude Levi-Strauss

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality. — Dallas Willard

For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on. — Alanna Mitchell

Whenever the occasional doubt starts to creep into my mind about my artistic ability, I start to think about the reality of having the greatest artist ever living inside of me. The One who created the orchid, peacock and the human circulatory system is the same God who gives me ideas for my next logo project. The God who parted the Red Sea is the same God who knows Photoshop. The God who raised Lazurus from the dead is the same God who brings new clients to me. He can do anything! If we want to talk about a fear of failing, we have to talk about being blessed to know the One who can do anything but fail. — V.L. Thompson

The human spirit fails, except when the Holy Spirit fills. — Corrie Ten Boom

Pride is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what would have others think of us. — Jane Austen

Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights. Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith. But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture - and making a blanket judgment about the world's second largest religion - is simply bigotry. — Reza Aslan

If your product solves real problems, has a simple, intuitive interaction and an appealing, easy-to-read visual design, yet people aren't using it, chances are your product is failing to communicate at a human level. — Everett N. McKay

Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we came and towards whom we are journeying. — Pope Benedict XVI

Did you blame the men who fired the guns, the men who built the guns, or the men who invented the guys? Did you blame the men who had put those particular guns in the hands attached to those particular trigger fingers? When Nick's plane crashed into the ocean off Honduras at a speed which turned the ocean to unyielding stone, was it Western Mountain's fault, for sending him out?Nick's, for going? Anne's, for letting him? Did you blame the human beings who had made such a world possible, or the world that had made such human beings possible?
The answer, she thought, lying now in her missing daughter's bed (Was it Miranda, for pushing a limit any time she saw one? Anne again, for uprooting her so callously, for failing in some way to adequately console her after her father's death?), was that you had two choices: you could blame everybody, or you could blame nobody. — Kelly Braffet

So deep and meaningful is the joy and the enthusiasm that is born in one's mind and heart by human love and helpfulness that it has the power to motivate for a lifetime ... You don't have to be a doctor to say or do that which puts light in a human eye or joy on a human face. Simply practice Jesus' commandment that we love one another. Go out and do something for somebody. These are the things that make happy people. Here is the one never-failing source of the joy and enthusiasm we are talking about. — Norman Vincent Peale

Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death? — Osamu Dazai

Politicians throughout history have tried to solve every problem conceivable to man, always failing to recognize that many of the problems we face result from previous so-called political solutions. Government cannot be the answer to every human ill. Continuing to view more government as the solution to problems will only make matters worse. — Ron Paul

Real Hope stares us in the face, but we do not see him. Instead, we dig into the mound of human ideas to extract a tiny shard of insight. We tell ourselves that we have finally found the key, the thing that will make a difference. We act on the insight and embrace the delusion of lasting personal change. But before long, disappointment returns. The change was temporary and cosmetic, failing to penetrate the heart of the problem. So, we go back to the mound again, determined this time to dig in the right place. Eureka! We find another shard of insight, seemingly more profound than before. We take it home, study it, and put it into practice. But we always end up in the same place. The good news confronts us with the reality that heart-changing help will never be found in the mound. It will only be found in the Man, Christ Jesus. We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer. In — Paul David Tripp

Leaving love behind is never easy, for it also asks that we leave behind the part of ourselves that did the loving. And yet for all but the very fortunate and the very foolish, this difficult transition is an inevitable part of the human experience, of the ceaseless learning journey that is life - because, after all, anything worth pursuing is worth failing at, and fail we do as we pursue. — Maria Popova

The American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially. — Margaret Halsey