Quotes & Sayings About Human Nurture

When couples start a family, they give up their personal love to achieve a greater responsibility - to nurture their children into good human beings. Nothing should deter them from that goal until the kids are up on their own feet — Siddharth Katragadda

You can't prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can't prescribe decently for something you despair in. If you despair of humankind, you're not going to have good policies for nurturing human beings. I think people ought to give prescriptions who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture. — Jane Jacobs

A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'
And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful.
It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....
Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'. — Ginger Gilmour

Coloron often pondered how a race, in which the stupid seemed more inclined to breed, had managed to come this far, and why human intelligence persisted - a discussion point in the nature vs nurture debate which had not died in half a millennium. — Neal Asher

I believe faith is a human universal. We are endowed at birth with nascent capacities for faith. How these capacities are activated and grow depends to a large extent on how we are welcomed into the world and what kinds of environments we grow in. Faith is interactive and social; it requires community, language, ritual and nurture. Faith is also shaped by initiatives from beyond us and other people, initiatives of spirit or grace. How these latter initiatives are recognized and imaged, or unperceived and ignored, powerfully affects the shape of faith in our lives. — James W. Fowler

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environmect or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world. — Chogyam Trungpa

We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life. — Mark Cantrell

The science of epigenetics has also made it clear that there are two mechanisms by which organisms pass on hereditary information. Those two mechanisms provide a way for scientists to study both the contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) in human behavior. If you only focus on the blueprints, as scientists have been doing for decades, the influence of the environment is impossible to fathom. (Dennis 2003; Chakravarti and Little 2003) — Bruce H. Lipton

The Mismeasure of Man treats one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth. Fortunately - and I made my decision on purpose - this limited subject embodies the deepest (and most common) philosophical error, with the most fundamental and far-ranging social impact, for the entire troubling subject of nature and nurture, or the genetic contribution to human social organization. — Stephen Jay Gould

Fire can warm or consume,
water can quench or drown,
wind can caress or cut.
And so it is with human relationshps;
we can both create and destroy,
nurture and terrorize,
traumatize and heal each other — Bruce D. Perry

More fundamental than religion is our basic human spirituality. We have a basic human disposition towards love, kindness and affection, irrespective of whether we have a religious framework or not. When we nurture this most basic human resource - when we set about cultivating those basic inner values which we all appreciate in others, then we start to live spiritually. — Dalai Lama

We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving "village." And to pursue a life of purpose.
We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.
We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come. — Raffi Cavoukian

Mankind's journey into space, like every great voyage of discovery, will become part of our unending journey of liberation. In the limitless reaches of space, we will find liberation from tyranny, from scarcity, from ignorance and from war. We will find the means to protect this Earth and to nurture every human life, and to explore the universe ... This is our mission, this is our destiny. — Ronald Reagan

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life. — Muriel Barbery

People were differentiated by this substance, which was called nganon. Nganon was a concentrate which was defined in each person by nurture and circumstance. She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth's people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from human kind, but others of the un-dead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions. — Joanne Greenberg

But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human. — Steven D. Levitt

On the quality of life: #1. Realize that each human being has a built-in capacity for recuperation and repair. #2. Recognize that the quality of life is all-important. #3. Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life. #4. Nurture the regenerative and restorative forces within you. #5. Utilize laughter to create a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work for yourself and those around you. #6. Develop confidence and ability to feel love, hope and faith, and acquire a strong will to live. — Norman Cousins

Seva, love and sacrifice are the basic prerequisites for human development. If you agree with this precept, nurture good will towards all and help people to the best of your ability without expecting anything in return. Don't think, 'I will render service only when the organizers agree with me and not otherwise.' Dear brother! In that case, you will not be able to serve. You will only nurture your ego by making others agree with you. — Asaram

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. — John Updike

Mom told me ... it's better to trust people than to doubt them. She said that people aren't born with kind hearts. When we're born, all we have are desires for food and material things. Selfish instincts, I guess. But she said that kindness is something that grows inside of each person's body ... but it's up to us to nurture that kindness in our hearts. That's why kindness is different for each person. Mom taught me that people's differences are something to celebrate ... When I thought of all the different shapes of human kindness
imaging them as round or square ... I got really excited. Your kindness is like a candle, Sohma-kun. I can feel it light up ... and I just want to smile. -Tohru — Natsuki Takaya

So you don't think that God created the brain?' I asked.
'No, I don't think that,' Dr. Enderby replied. 'I think that the brain created God. Because the human brain, however wonderful, is still quite fallible - as both you and I know. It's always searching for answers, but even when it's working as it should, its explanations are rarely perfect - especially when it comes to very big, complicated questions. That's why we have to nurture it. We have to give it plenty of space to develop. — Gavin Extence

After forty years of working on prevention of a wide range of common and costly psychological and behavioral problems, I am convinced we have the knowledge to achieve a healthier, happier, and more prosperous society than has ever been seen in human history. — Anthony Biglan

Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite.
The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our "soul", and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all.

Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives:
-our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and
-the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

In Jump Time's developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society. — Jean Houston

The fabric of human life is woven with relationships. Once we thematize the importance of dialogue, the multiplicity of ongoing and created situations in which dialogical skills can be nurtured abound. As we have seen, this requires us to slow down and turn toward each other, having a clear sense of the relationship between our current footing in dialogue with one another and the future we are trying to create. The nurture of dialogical capacities is essential to human liberation. — Mary Watkins

Nearly all problems of human behavior stem from our failure to ensure that people live in environments that nurture their well-being. — Anthony Biglan

Humans have evolved levels of cooperation that are unprecedented among primate species. You can see it even in babies. Say you are playing with a baby and begin to put the toys in a box. If you point to one of the toys, the baby is likely to put it in the box (Liebal et al. 2009)... Human babies are more likely than other primates to follow another's pointing or gaze. Thus, even before adults have socialized them, babies show tendencies to be in sync with the social behavior of others, to infer others' intentions to cooperate, and to prefer cooperation in others. — Anthony Biglan

I went back to work right away [after prison]. I was very lucky - a friend of mine created a job for me at his company. Most prisoners who come home face really significant challenges when it comes to finding work. It's very, very hard for most people who have a criminal record to get a job. I think the system is very wasteful of taxpayers' dollars. It's also very wasteful of human potential. I found that most people whom I was locked up with were, you know, good people who have skills and value. Prison is a missed opportunity to nurture those things. — Piper Kerman

It is my fundamental conviction that compassion - the natural capacity of the human heart to feel concern for and connection with another human being - constitutes a basic aspect of our nature shared by all human beings, as well as being the foundation of our happiness. All ethical teachings, whether religious or nonreligious, aim to nurture this innate and precious quality, to develop it and to perfect it. — Dalai Lama

Our survival as a human community may depend as much upon our nurture of love in infancy and childhood as upon the protection of our society from external threats. — Selma Fraiberg

Let us continue to work together to develop and nurture in future generations a culture of human rights, to promote freedom, security and peace in all nations. — Kofi Annan

The universe story and the human story are a play of forces rational and nonrational, conscious and unconscious; of fate and fortune, nature and nurture. Forces of good and evil play out their tragedies and their graces - leading us to catastrophes, backtracking, mutations, transgressions, regroupings, enmities, failures, mistakes, and impossible dilemmas. — Richard Rohr

No man is as wise as Mother Earth. She has witnessed every human day, every human struggle, every human pain, and every human joy. For maladies of both body and spirit, the wise ones of old pointed man to the hills. For man too is of the dust and Mother Earth stands ready to nurture and heal her children. — Anasazi Foundation

The nature-nurture debate is, of course, far from over when it comes to identifying the endowment shared by all human beings and understanding how it allows us to learn, which is the main topic of the preceding chapters. But when it comes to the question of what makes people within the mainstream of a society different from one another - whether they are smarter or duller, nicer or nastier, bolder or shyer - the nature-nurture debate, as it has been played out for millennia, really is over, or ought to be. — Steven Pinker

Too many land users and too many conservationists seem to have accepted the doctrine that the availability of goods is determined by the availability of cash, or credit, and by the market. In other words, they have accepted the idea always implicit in the arguments of the land-exploiting corporations: that there can be, and that there is, a safe disconnection between economy and ecology, between human domesticity and the wild world. Industrializing farmers have too readily assumed that the nature of their land could safely be subordinated to the capability of their technology, and that conservation could safely be left to conservationists. Conservationists have too readily assumed that the integrity of the natural world could be preserved mainly by preserving tracts of wilderness, and that the nature and nurture of the economic landscapes could safely be left to agribusiness, the timber industry, debt-ridden farmers and ranchers, and migrant laborers. To — Wendell Berry

I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process. — Jane Addams

Societies as well as people become afraid of change as they grow older. It's human nature. The young have adventures while the old sit at home and nurture their memories. — Paul J. McAuley

While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. — Jonah Lehrer

In a fundamental sense, Earth and the community of human beings comprise the most basic environment in which we, as humanity, share as we try to nurture the seed of the soul. Therefore, healing, in its most fundamental and largest sense, is healing of the Earth and humanity. — Ilchi Lee

Love the family! Defend and promote it as the basic cell of human
society; nurture it as the prime sanctuary of life. Give great care to the
preparation of engaged couples and be close to young married couples, so
that they will be for their children and the whole community an eloquent
testimony of God's love. — Pope John Paul II

God is an inner strength that is inside humans, therefore faith should be about breaking away from material bondage and the mechanical fabrication of human nurture.'

- Jagdeep Takk — Jagdeep Takk

The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness. — Derren Brown

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn't even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation. — Grace Lee Boggs

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility. — Eugene H. Peterson

This was where she discovered that intelligence, this wonderful gift, grows in silence, not in noise. It was here too that she learnt that a human mind, a truly human mind, is nurtured over time, with hard work and discipline. — Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.8 In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

I see that White Light will only return to the planet when every human being recognizes every other human being as an individualized frequency of the White Light. As long as we keep eliminating or devaluing other human beings we have decided we don't like, ie., destroying frequencies of the spectrum, we will not be able to experience the White Light. Our job is to protect and nurture each human frequency so that the White Light can return. — Bruce H. Lipton

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.
And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come. — John Green

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man. — Milan Kundera

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman's body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman. — Adrienne Rich

I am convinced that the way forward for the human race is to recognize and protect the fundamental right of sovereignty over consciousness, to throw off the chains of our divisive religious heritage, to seek out forms of spirituality (or no spirituality at all if we so prefer) that are truly supportive of liberty and tolerance, to help the human spirit to grow rather than to wither, and to nurture our innate capacity for love and mutual respect. The old ways are broken and bankrupt and new ways are struggling to be born. Each one of us with our own talents, and by our own choices, has a part to play in that process. — Graham Hancock

Compassionate leaders honor the complexity of human relationships, nurture authenticity and create common grounds for blooming great ideas of individuals. — Amit Ray

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true. — Susan J. Tweit

My main interest is in the promotion of human values. From birth we have a sense of affection and some sense of concern for others. We need to nurture it. Scientists have found that to ensure even physical health peace of mind is essential. People often think that love and compassion are only matters of religious concern, but in fact such values are necessary in all human relations — Dalai Lama

There is a human capital crisis in the federal government. Not only are we losing the decades of talent as civil servants retire, we are not doing enough to develop and nurture the next generation of public servants. — Daniel Akaka

I valued the experience of making the recordings, and I value the performances contained therein, and I value so much of what they can represent. I also think they're a terrific listening experience. Putting them out this way was a way of trying to maintain and nurture the relationship with the audience and also shine a light on the recent past, because we are so apt to be forgetful as human beings that there was such a thing as a recent past. These are some of the reasons for making this record. — Will Oldham