Human Warmth Quotes & Sayings

Is the warming unprecedented? Probably not. There is abundant historical and proxy evidence for both hotter and cooler periods in human history. Is it our fault? Again, maybe. The correlation of increasing warmth with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations is particularly weak; that with solar energy and with ocean movements is much stronger. — Don Aitkin

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting ... On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain. — E.B. White

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.
Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System. — Haruki Murakami

I kept learning about being a widow in little, distant flashes. I saw that after a long while, if you had no one to touch you, you might eventually become someone who went to beauty parlors and paid to have strangers do your hair. You'd pay for the sensation of it, the hands of another human being pouring warmth on you, gently smoothing, stroking. You'd close your eyes and lean back into those hands and your face might have exactly that look, I thought.

Life just goes on, you see, any old way it can. Even the dead can't interrupt the flow. — Joyce Johnson

I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture. — Carrie Fisher

Brown people and black people and red people swarmed through our great halls, until those who were white looked simply faded-out human beings beside them. Indeed, I came to see that white is not a color in skin any more than in textiles, and if it had not quality, it had no value even for humanity. I saw that color in skin had a certain advantage in strength and warmth as a means of beauty. — Candace Wheeler

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. — Carl Jung

No one likes the fellow who is all rogue, but we'll forgive him almost anything if there is warmth of human sympathy underneath his rogueries. The immortal types of comedy are just such men. — W.C. Fields

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. — May Sarton

Right Here.
Beside a living, breathing human
being who cares for me. I can see
it in the cool lagoons of his eyes,
hear it in the timbre of his voice
when he speaks my name.
Right here.
Where the warmth of his skin
tempers the February cold and
the thinnest beam of his inner
light overcomes winter's pall.
He is a candle in the wilderness.
Right here.
Where the omnipresent specter
of death takes flight, awed
by the power of the two of us,
hearts beating in unison, as we
stumble through the darkness
toward one another. — Ellen Hopkins

And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment. — John Edward Williams

What was it - this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn't have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation. — Tom Wolfe

Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta, only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no other. — Stephen King

He sounded like he might just as well have been off in the emptiness of some awful cold black hole, out there in the timeless infinity far beyond the reach of warmth and earthly human feeling — Angela Bowie

The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness. — Anais Nin

Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I could feel the warmth of the dog through my nightgown; I must have gotten hot during the night and thrown off the sheet. I drowsily patted the animal's head and began to stroke his fur, my fingers running idly through the thick hair. He wriggled even closer, sniffed my face, put his arm around me.
His *arm*?
I was off the bed and shrieking in one move.
In my bed, Sam propped himself on his elbows, sunny side up, and looked at me with some amusement.
"Oh, ohmyGod! Sam, how'd you get here? What are you doing? Where's Dean?" I covered my face with my hands and turned back, but I'd certainly seen all there was to see of Sam.
"Woof," said Sam, from a human throat, and the truth stomped over me in combat boots.
I whirled back to face him, so angry I felt like I was going to blow a gasket.
"You watched me undress last night, you ... you ... damn dog! — Charlaine Harris

I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts. — Shusaku Endo

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best. — Edward Hirsch

I find it odd- the greed of mankind. People only like you for as long as they perceive they can get what they want from you. Or for as long as they perceive you are who they want you to be. But I like people for all of their changing surprises, the thoughts in their heads, the warmth that changes to cold and the cold that changes to warmth ... for being human. The rawness of being human delights me. — C. JoyBell C.

You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes. — Anne Rice

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals ... We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us
create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009) — Haruki Murakami

Now she knew the haven she had sought in dreams, the place of warm safety which had always been hidden from her in the mist. It was not Ashley - oh, never Ashley! There was no more warmth in him than in a marsh light, no more security than in quicksand. It was Rhett - Rhett who had strong arms to hold her, a broad chest to pillow her tired head, jeering laughter to pull her affairs into proper perspective. And complete understanding, because he, like her, saw truth as truth, unobstructed by impractical notions of honor, sacrifice, or high belief in human nature. — Margaret Mitchell

As though he was really saying that all desire for positive happiness is implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied. But Pierre believed it without any mental reservation. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one's needs and consequent freedom in the choice of one's occupation, that is, of one's way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be indubitably man's highest happiness. Here and now for the first time he fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat, drinking when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to talk and to hear a human voice. The satisfaction of one's needs - good food, cleanliness, and freedom - now — Leo Tolstoy

Only when religion is exposed to light of day, only when the believers walk out of the proverbial cave in that light, will humanity feel the warmth of the sun on their corporate faces. In the light of truth one will not need to fear for loss of faith or hope or even love. For faith, hope and love are parts of the human spiritual experience. Spirituality at its best is what we may find when we relieve ourselves of the fear of loss. — Leviak B. Kelly

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man's quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness. — Benjamin Percy

WHEN the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity - nay not only the opportunity but the urge - to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. — Anonymous

O virgin mother, daughter of thy Son,
humble beyond all creatures and more exalted;
predestined turning point of God's intention;
Thy merit so ennobled human nature
that its divine Creator did not scorn
to make Himself the creature of His creature.
The Love that was rekindled in Thy womb
sends for the warmth of the eternal peace
within whose ray this flower has come to bloom.
Here to us, thou art the noon and scope
of Love revealed; and among mortal men,
the living fountain of eternal hope. — Dante Alighieri

I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands. — Jim Thompson

I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realized the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit. — Matt Haig

On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face og the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh, the strange complexion of timber, warm eithout exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant! — Bruno Schulz

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification. — Bruce Dickinson

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits. — Cormac McCarthy

She would have lacked that inner warmth which somehow survives despite the relentless drudgery and constant proximity to human suffering. Her patients to her would have been flesh, bones, blood, not people. — Dorothy Simpson

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I couldn't help smiling as he grasped my arms and held me in place because his warmth infected me. I hadn't known I was freezing until he held me. I hadn't known until then, after the long hours of separation, that with Cain I could pretend to be human. — Jennifer Silverwood

This is it, I thought. This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run. — Martha N. Beck

Classical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away. — Gelsey Kirkland

A large house left deserted by those who have filled its rooms with emotions and life, expresses a silence, a quality all its own. A house unfurnished and empty seems less impressively silent. The fact of its devoidness of sound is upon the whole more natural. But carpets accustomed to the pressure of constantly passing feet, chairs and sofas which have held human warmth, draperies used to the touch of hands drawing them aside to let in daylight, pictures which have smiled back at thinking eyes, mirrors which have reflected faces passing hourly in changing moods, elate or dark or longing, walls which have echoed back voices - all these things when left alone seem to be held in strange arrest, as if by some spell intensifying the effect of the pause in their existence. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. I admired and respected her - for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys. — Queen Elizabeth II

Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really 'understand' about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and need warmth, concern. — Rudy Wiebe

People have entire relationships via text message now, but I am not partial to texting. I need context, nuance and the warmth and tone that can only come from a human voice. — Danielle Steel

Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth," I answered honestly. "Sometimes, if I can't feel something like the warmth of a woman's skin, I get so lonely I can't stand it. — Haruki Murakami

I settled on the floor and whispered to Sam, "I want you to listen to me, if you can." I leaned the side of my face against his ruff and remembered the golden wood he had shown me so long ago. I remembered the way the yellow leaves, the color of Sam's eyes, fluttered and twisted, crashing butterflies, on their way to the ground. The slender white trunks of the birches, creamy and smooth as human skin. I remembered Sam standing in the middle of the wood, his arms stretched out, a dark, solid form in the dream of the trees. His coming to me, me punching his chest, the soft kiss. I remembered every kiss we'd ever had, and I remembered every time I'd curled in his human arms. I remembered the soft warmth of his breath on the back of my neck while we slept.
I remembered Sam. — Maggie Stiefvater

They are the humans who are intelligent enough to have insight of every single molecular underpinning of the warmth of love, and yet not let that factual knowledge ruin the romance in a relationship. — Abhijit Naskar

And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love. — Eldridge Cleaver

In the great wealth, the great firmament of your nation's generosities this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric, but the mere fact of it ... the prodigal, pure, human kindness of it ... must be seen as a beautiful star in that firmament which shines upon me at this moment, dazzling me a little, but filling me with warmth of the extraordinary elation, the euphoria that happens to so many of us at the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow. — Laurence Olivier

Kindness is gracious demonstrate sensitivity and human warmth. — Kishore Bansal

Interest and enthusiasm are the wellspring of continually evolving community life: they create bonds which unite us whether we are young or old, nearby or far from each other; they allow human warmth and love to be the formative forces in personal and community life and striving. — Henning Hansmann

Of all human lamentations, without doubt, the most common is if only I had known. But we can't know, and so days of death and fire so often begin no differently than those of love and warmth. — Tom Clancy

Over time I learned that objects and animals are true friends. In the forest I was surrounded by trees, bushes, birds, and small animals. I was not afraid of them. I was sure that they would do nothing harmful to me. I became familiar with cows and with horses, and they provided me with a warmth that has remained with me to this very day. Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. — Aharon Appelfeld

Is there any of the usual social occasions which it is not difficult to avoid? But if you decide that you cannot very well ignore your worldly obligations, and that you will therefore carry them out properly, the demands on your time will multiply, bringing physical hardship and mental tension; in the end, you will spend your whole life pointlessly entangled in petty obligations.
'The day is ending, the way is long; my life already begins to stumble on its journey.' The time has come to abandon all ties. I shall not keep promises, nor consider decorum. Let anyone who cannot understand my feelings feel free to call me mad, let him think I am out of my senses, that I am devoid of human warmth. Abuse will not bother me; I shall not listen if praised. — Yoshida Kenko

If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2 — Stratford Caldecott

AN EXQUISITELY SHARPENED HATRED FOR the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro's soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak - hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being - is not common to all Negroes. — William Styron

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth. — Kazuo Ishiguro

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion. — Theodor Adorno

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth - the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture. — Emanuel Swedenborg

Truth is not subjective, like some people think. There are basic truths that cannot be denied. I like to call them "Common Denominator Truths," such as the need to be loved, the need for warmth and shelter, the need for food and drink, and so on. These common core truths are at the center of being human, and no matter how much humanity tries to alter their own perception of what matters in this world, these basic truths cannot be ignored. — Lyra Shanti

I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you'll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that's ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you're worth. The — Adam Johnson

I put my head on his shoulder
'Wh-what are you doing?' he yells, shoving me away from him with wide eyes.
'I was giving you a hug!' I say.
'Y-you-!'
'Pff. D'you really think I'd do that? I'm trying to keep warm, idiot. You're like my overgrown Furby.'
'I'm in a human form, not my kytaen!'
'Tomayto, tomahto.' I come close to him.
He pushes me away. 'You shouldn't be doing that!'
'What's the problem? You said you're my tool, right? Well, I'm cold, tool of mine, so why don't you calm the hell down and give me some of that sweet, sweet warmth?'
'Don't touch me!'
'I'm starting to think you're self-conscious in this form. You let me cuddle you in your other-'
'We did not cuddle!' he shouts.
I manage a grin. 'Would you prefer I use a different word? Snuggle, maybe? — Giselle Simlett

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. — Edward Hirsch

He (Michael) was gone in a whisper of air, hardly making any sound at all, and Claire shivered and leaned against Shane's solid, very human warmth. His arms went around her, and he touched
his lips lightly to the back of her neck. "How can you smell this good after the kind of crappy day we've had?"
"I sweat perfume. Like all girls. — Rachel Caine

In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability ...
The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being
in Egypt, India or China
gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both ... It's a curious fact that the
all-male religions have produced no religious imagery
in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle. — Kenneth Clark

Natural warmth is our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor. It is also our capacity to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. It's the whole gamut of what often are called the heart qualities, qualities that are a natural part of being human. Natural warmth has the power to heal all relationships - the relationship with ourselves as well as with people, animals, and all that we encounter every day of our lives. — Pema Chodron

All the misfits of the world--the too fat and too lean, the too tall and the too short, the jerk, the drip, the half-wit and the spastic, the harelip and the gimp. All the broken, the doomed, the drunk and the disillusioned--herding together for a little human warmth, where a one-room kitchenette is an apartment and the naked electric bulb hangs suspended from the ceiling like an exposed nerve — Lawrence Lipton

I had never felt the allure of another human being this strongly, warmth and curiosity mixing to form an unspoken question in the air. — Lisa Kleypas

Respect for humanity! Respect for humanity! If such respect is rooted in the human heart, humanity will eventually establish a social, political, or economic system that reflects it. A civilization is before all else rooted in its substance. At first this was a blind urge for warmth. Then by trial and error man found the way to the fire.
That is probably why, my friend, I have such need of your friendship. I need a companion who - beyond the struggles of reason - respects in me the pilgrim on his way to that fire. I sometimes need to feel the promised warmth ahead of time and to rest somewhere beyond myself in that meeting place that will be ours. [ ... ] Beyond the clumsiness of my words, beyond my defective reasoning, you are ready to see me as a human being. You are ready to honor in me the representative of beliefs, customs, loves. If I differ from you, far from wronging you, I enrich you. You question me as you would a traveler. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery