Quotes & Sayings About Insignificance Of Human

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind. — Carl Sagan

Humans were so preoccupied with love. They were all desperate to form an attachment to one person they could refer to as their other half. It seemed from my reading of literature that being in love meant becoming the beloveds entire world. The rest of the universe paled into insignificance compared to the lovers. When they were separated, each fell into a melancholy state, and only when they were reunited did their hearts start beating again. Only when they were together could really see the colors of the world. When they were apart, that color leached away, leaving everything a hazy gray. I lay in bed, wondering about the intensity of this emotion that was so irrational and so irrefutably human. What if a persons face was so sacred to you it was permanently inscribed in your memory? What if their smell and touch were dearer to you than life itself? — Alexandra Adornetto

How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day. — Jean Vanier

One day when I went to see him (Picasso), we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, 'Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I'm concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.'I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust gifted with autonomous movement and who didn't therefore need a broom. I could go out by myself. — Francoise Gilot

For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin. — Thomas Ligotti

Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed. — Gary Greenberg

Compared with the awesome might and eternal power of the ocean, no human being can fail to be reminded of their own insignificance. — Roz Savage

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad. — Gabriel Chevallier

Volume II: Chapter V
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I - I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. — Mary Shelley

Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and even
to raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At the
same time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendous
crimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than a
relatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to find
a more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmic
levels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives. — Boria Sax

I have lost patience with the idea of an insignificant human being standing up above the rest of us
whether he is called Reverend or Doctor or Judge
and shouting at us all about this thing or that. As soon as someone starts to pontificate in this way, I am apt to cut him off or leave the room, or, if this can't be done gracefully, I simply arrange that sweet vapid smile on my face that was so useful during the trial but that so infuriates Dr. Cole. After all, I have already taken the measure of my own insignificance, and I survived. — Charlotte Rogan

Our concerns sink into insignificance when compared with the eternal value of human personality - a potential child of God which is destined to triumph over lie, pain, and death. No one can take this sublime meaning of life away from us, and this is the one thing that matters. — Igor Sikorsky

To the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul and of personal responsibility, I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible immortality of the nation. — Adolf Hitler

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. ["On the Ignorance of the Learned"] — William Hazlitt

Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so. — George S. Patton

See how small your are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger that you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty. — Alain De Botton

If you consider the contribution of plumbing to human life, the other sciences fade into insignificance. — James P. Gorman

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night. — Laura Marling

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility. — Rollo May

People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead. — Nathan Myhrvold

Our task and challenge as human beings is to appreciate, in the same instant, both the infinite significance and absolute insignificance of life. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

To those who live in the narrow circle of human interests and human feelings, there ever exists, unheeded, almost unnoticed, before their very eyes, the most humbling proofs of their own comparative insignificance in the scale of creation, which, in the midst of their admitted mastery over the earth and all it contains, it would be well for them to consider, if they would obtain just views of what they are and what they were intended to be. — James Fenimore Cooper

He understood the mind's pride, filleting, pinning down life. Understood taking apart, reassembling and labeling. To Understand was to control, to keep the terror of human insignificance at bay. It was routine to self-importance, this ability to kill and to rebuild, to catalog and stop any motion too directly pointing out human limitation and death. — Melissa Pritchard

Thus it takes the imminence of an infinite calamity to redeem the human adventure. On this level our age testifies to a narcissism of malediction that rips it out of its insignificance and reaffirms its centrality: by designating itself as damned, it merely emphasizes its singularity while apparently depreciating itself: 'Our period is not accidentally ephemeral; ephemerality is its essence. It cannot pass into another period but only collapse' (Anders, La Menace nucleaire, pag. 100).
What a relief to know that we are not living in a little province of time but in the historic moment when time itself is going to be engulfed! What presumption, and what naivite, to believe that we are the pinnacle of history! This self-abasement is a form of vainglory. If we can't be the best, we can still be the worst. Behind their lamentations, the catastrophists are bursting with self-importance. — Pascal Bruckner

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience. — Vasily Grossman

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he's but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other. — M. Scott Peck

When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live. — Angelina Grimke

Volume II: Chapter 5
The God sends down his angry plagues from high,
Famine and pestilence in heaps they die.
Again in vengeance of his wrath he falls
On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls;
Arrests their navies on the ocean's plain,
And whelms their strength with mountains of the main. — Mary Shelley