Life Not Being A Race Quotes & Sayings

The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground.
from the short story The Namesake — Willa Cather

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough. — Paul Beatty

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal. — Essex Hemphill

There is no racism against white people. If you can turn on the tv and see people like you that's not racism. If you can have your favorite characters who are poc race changed to look like you then you don't face racism. If you don't think about Ferguson every single second because your race is being killed every hour, that's not racism. If you don't get called derogatory slurs because of your skin tone that's not racism. If you don't hate your body because of your race that's not racism. If you don't have to go through life knowing people will think of you as ugly or disgusting and hate you simply because your white that's not racism. You don't face racism for being white. Ya people can be jerks about it. But its not institutionalized. That's like saying you face discrimination for being straight. It's not a thing. You don't face racism. You might want to get over that — Adam Snowflake

Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment. — Robert Sheaffer

To the Virgins, To Make much of Time
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he is to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while you may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry. — Robert Herrick

I do not think men are good at all. I have seen enough to know that humans are a wicked race from their very birth. Selfishness defines us. Greed and lust motivate us. And even the best man who ever lived would lie to preserve his own life or beliefs. No, mankind is far from being essentially good. It takes exceptional individuals to change the world, to make a difference. Give the average person a choice, and he will make life miserable for others if only it will make his own life easier. — Brondt Kamffer

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work. — Gloria Steinem

Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I've never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn't have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am. — Orson Welles

I will not join the rat race because I'm not a rat. And I will not blindly follow a specific faith because I'm not a bat. The only race I'll take part in is for humans being humane. It's called the human race, and sadly it's got the least participants. — Suzy Kassem

We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms that require the lowest degree of consciousness. One lives in it less by reflection than by reflex. The effect of the uniform blows with which the environment strikes us is to make us insensitive to any but the most violent stimuli; two-thirds of life ceases to exist for us because the valves of attention require cataclysmic upheavals before they will open. Lacking the capacity to be excited by any but the most gross and violent stimuli, we spend our lives in a frantic race with boredom. — Denham Sutcliffe

Thinking about such a situation, one becomes aware of the human lack of detachment; our inexperience and immaturity in the complex problems of the human condition. But it should not be so. We have the 'breathing spaces' when we can take a detached point of view. If it was of life-or-death importance that we learned by these moments of insight, men would quickly become something closer to being godlike. But most of us can drift through life without making any great moral decisions. And so the human race has shown no advance in wisdom in three thousand years. — Colin Wilson

Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain't no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival. — Kiese Laymon

Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way. — John Ruskin

Turns out, there was one - and only one - characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result - social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it's huge - most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life. — Shawn Achor

Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible. And each person could not begin from the same point, for the world has not just come into being; it is diverse and infinitely varied in its parts. The mere fact that one individual is necessarily born in a different place from someone else immediately insures that his inherited opportunity cannot be the same as his neighbor's. — Murray Rothbard

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

The miracle is in the breaking. It is in the breaking that God multiplies not enough into more than enough. Are there broken places in your life so painful that you fear the breaking will destroy you? Do you come from a broken home? Did you have a broken marriage? Did you have a broken past? Have you experienced brokenness in your body? Have your finances been broken? You may think your brokenness has disqualified you from being able to run in the divine relay, but as with my own life and Kalli's, when we give God our brokenness, it qualifies us to be used by God to carry a baton of hope, restoration, and grace to others on the sidelines who are broken. What should have disqualified Kalli from the race was the very thing that qualified her for it. Put your broken pieces into God's hands and watch him use them to work his wonders. — Christine Caine

No one could understand; nor could she explain it herself. This senseless kindness is condemned in the fable about the pilgrim who warmed a snake in his boson. It is the kindness that has mercy on a tarantula that has bitten a child. A mad, blind kindness. People enjoy looking in stories and fables for examples of the danger of this kind of senseless kindness. But one shouldn't be afraid of it. One might just as well be afraid of a freshwater fish carried out by chance into the salty ocean. The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that emanates from those who are endowed with it. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No it says, life is not evil. — Vasily Grossman

The great mistake of contemporary life is that we have made such a virtue of intellectual growth while almost totally ignoring the necessity of conscience growth. We have failed to understand that individual evolution can take place not only in mental but in moral power. The earth tragically today is full of people who remain fixated on a childish level of conscience. What an illusion has blinded the human race: that our conscience is given to us once and for all at birth and we ourselves have to do little or nothing about it ... The truth is that our moral capacity is purely potential and needs strenuous training, education and development. It is certainly not an organic power that comes to us at birth, like breathing, which demands little attention from us as long as we live ... A revolution has to take place in our thinking about morality. We have to become as sensitive about being moral morons as we are now anxious about being intellectual idiots. — Joshua Loth Liebman

I don't run for trains." Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If there is anything in life I know to be true, it is that life itself is a matter of the spirit. A man with a broken spirit, whose soul nourished nothing except the belief that the poison within his own heart is shared by the whole human race, and hopes anything beyond the desire that everyone he meets will share in his misery, is sick indeed, and his body, however healthy in its potential, is on a path toward corruption; but the person with a purpose, warmed by the impression that, for all his other shortcomings, something resides within him that is capable of loving and of being loved, can bear all things, believe all things, endure all things. That person's body will heal faster than medical minds imagine. It will overcome pain; in many cases, it will not feel it at all. — Randall Wallace

The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.
It's more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from the entire human race, it seemed; I didn't even feel part of it. I was a subspecies of the people who walked the streets and went about their daily lives. I was not part of the world they'd built and lived in. I was like a half-formed variety of what they were; a critter that was intended to be like them but was never finished. I was unworthy of the space I took up in that world and the lies I showcased in order to fit in. — Leanne Waters

Adversity is a school that you need not apply to be enrolled. It has no respect for age, wealth, education, race, power, fame or beauty. It is a school among schools and every human being passes through the school in one format or the other. It is also possible to attend the post graduate department without your consent. You can never attend the school and be the same again. It will change you and purge you of all the things you think that you know. It will bring you to a leveling far beyond all your imaginations. You may also be required to repeat a class with different course or instructors. — FRESH IN THE SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY By M M Kirschbaum

It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together - a longing which shall never perish from the earth, but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name. But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me - life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I shall be repeated. — Mark Twain

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt. — George Santayana

My life is parallel to a horse race. They have blinders on to keep them from being distracted in the race and keep them focused on winning the race. That's kind of like my life. Focus on the goal, not the things coming at me from the side. — Reggie Bush

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean. — Toni Morrison

All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman. — Washington Irving

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth. — Rebecca West

Being transgender guarantees you will upset someone. People get upset with transgender people who choose to inhabit a third gender space rather than "pick a side." Some get upset at transgender people who do not eschew their birth histories. Others get up in arms with those who opted out of surgical options, instead living with their original equipment. Ire is raised at those who transition, then transition again when they decide that their initial change was not the right answer for them. Heck, some get their dander up simply because this or that transgender person simply is not "trying hard enough" to be a particular gender, whatever that means. Some are irked that the Logo program RuPaul's Drag Race shows a version of transgender life different from their own. Meanwhile, all around are those who have decided they aren't comfortable with the lot of us, because we dared to change from one gender expression or identity to some other. — Kate Bornstein