Simple Human Being Quotes & Sayings

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. — Eckhart Tolle

In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period. — Rollo May

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all. — William Osler

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And — Leo Tolstoy

Being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth - that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the — Leo Tolstoy

Maybe it was as simple as believing things were what you wanted them to be? Maybe that was all it took? If there was anything Byron had learned that summer, it was that a thing was capable of being not one but many different things, and some of them contradictory. Not everything had a label. Or if it did, you had to be prepared to re-examine that label from time to time and paste another alongside it. The truth could be true, but not in a definite way. It could be more or less true; and maybe that was the best a human being could hope for. — Rachel Joyce

She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad. Somewhere, — Robert Goolrick

TEF is predicated on logic, a simple wager that every human faces:
If a reasoning human being loves and values life, they will want to live as long as possible-the desire to be immortal. Nevertheless, it's impossible to know if they're going to be immortal once they die. To do nothing doesn't help the odds of attaining immortality-since it seems evident that everyone will die someday and possibly cease to exist. To try to do something scientifically constructive towards ensuring immortality beforehand is the most logical conclusion. — Zoltan Istvan

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. — Virginia Woolf

The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so. — James Anthony Froude

Positive self-expectancy is the first, most outwardly identifiable quality of a top-achieving, winning human being. Positive self-expectancy is pure and simple optimism: real enthusiasm for everything you do ... [while] expecting the most favorable result from your own actions. There never was a winner who didn't expect to win in advance. Winners understand that life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And they know that you usually get what you expect in the long run. — Denis Waitley

I am just a human being - solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too - But I'm invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible. — H.G.Wells

Generally speaking, we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need. For example, a person who is trying to find his salvation only in a love relationship but who is being defeated by this too narrow focus is neurotic. He can become overly passive and dependent, fearful of venturing out on his own, of making his life without his partner, no matter how that partner treats him. The object has become his "All," his whole world; and he is reduced to the status of a simple reflex of another human being. — Ernest Becker

Don't try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being. — Vernon Howard

Universally accepted, microevolution has limits for what it can explain. These limits do not reach the center where the controversy lies - the Thesis of Common Ancestry was popularized by Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that the world we see today has come to us through an evolutionary process called natural selection. Through genetic mutation, species adapt and develop because the strongest of a species will survive and pass on their DNA to their successors. Macroevolution is the belief that all development - from the first moments of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, to the eventual emergence of simple bacteria, to the most complex human being is explainable through this naturalistic transformational process. — Jon Morrison

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Buddhist philosophy is an interpretation of ordinary human experience, but an interpretation which is not revealed by God nor discovered in the access of inspiration nor seen in a mystical light. Basically, Buddhist metaphysics is a very simple and natural elaboration of the implications of Buddha's own experience of enlightenment. Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to "believe in" the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience. It is conceivable that one might have the "enlightenment" without being aware of any discursive philosophical implications at all. — Thomas Merton

Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were. — David Levithan

I believe the real reason we pursue anything in life is not for the thing itself, but for who we become on the way to its accomplishment. We strive to accomplish things in the attempt to mold ourselves. The greatest benefits Jiu Jitsu will have in your life will have nothing to do with Jiu Jitsu. It is this simple understanding that allows me to persist in my study. Even on the rare days when I may not have a burning desire to practice Jiu Jitsu, I am reminded that my practicing Jiu Jitsu is more accurately my practicing to become a better human being. The lessons I learn on the mat will serve me in every area of life
personal development, relationships, business, and the like. — Chris Matakas

How can we share the gifts of nature? By sharing the monetary value that human beings assign to nature. The fundamental thing we need to abolish is the mechanism by which people unfairly profit from land. The solution is simple: Property owners merely need to pay the communities from which they receive benefits through their exclusive use of land the exact market value of the benefits they receive.

When land users pay significant proportions of the rental value of land to their local communities, they rightfully reimburse their communities. These can be called Community Land Contributions.

Unlike, land value taxes, CLCs relate to the rental value (which subsumes all natural and social benefits) not land price. Also, a tax implies land users are being taxed on their land values while CLCs emphasize that land is a community good. — Martin Adams

You are not a singular self. You are a corporation. Inside you is eternity. A human being is not so simple. — Frederick Lenz

A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is. — Nancy Kress

I am as proud to be called a feminist as I am to be called a Jew, or an American. Feminism is an indivisible part of who I am, and I remain mystified by the stigma that has been attached to the idea that women are human beings.
It sounds so obvious and simple to me, so motherhood and apple pie. And yet the idea that women are human beings remains news, a message that requires constant, clear, and artful reinforcement in a world that continues to undermine the confidence and abilities of girls and women. On the day that the intelligence and talents of women are fully honored and employed, the human community and the planet itself will benefit in ways we can only being to imagine. — Anita Diamant

It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil. — Gerald G. May

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

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it, If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart? — Jack Kornfield

Intolerance lies at the core of evil. Not the intolerance that results from any threat or danger. But intolerance of another being who dares to exist. Intolerance without cause. It is so deep within us, because every human being secretly desires the entire universe to himself. Our only way out is to learn compassion without cause. To care for each other simple because that 'other' exists. — Menachem Mendel Schneerson

The egoic mind imagines a problem, and then it imagines a solution. When we get caught up in these thoughts, we feel like we have a problem that has to be solved before we can be happy. But the problem is just imagined! When we drop out of involvement with these thoughts and into the simple experience of the present moment, we discover that everything is fine just the way it is. Life never had to be any different than it is, nor do we. We can be the "imperfect" human we are. In fact, we weren't designed to be anything other than the human being that we are. — Gina Lake

Every great artist must begin by learning to draw with the single line, and my advice to young animators is to learn how to live with that razor-sharp instrument or art. An artist who comes to me with eight or ten good drawings of the human figure in simple lines has a good chance of being hired. But I will tell the artist who comes with a bunch of drawings of Bugs Bunny to go back and learn how to draw the human body. An artist who knows that can learn how to draw ANYTHING, including Bugs Bunny. — Chuck Jones

The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right. — David Souter

The wars around the globe into which religion is woven
violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States
deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it. — Gustav Niebuhr

One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It's the same thing: a child asks, "What's going to happen next?" When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it's not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it. — Ayad Akhtar

This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don't know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And, now, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war — Irwin Shaw

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself
be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself
by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love
the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. — Viktor E. Frankl

My feelings about Michael Jackson are simple I think that um he's a human being like everyone else and I'm a huge fan of Michael and um nobody is perfect. — LL Cool J

The central idea of the present book is very simple. It is that education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of 'skills' in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being. — Stratford Caldecott

The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything. — Steven Van Zandt

There's not a human being alive I won't talk to. There's a quite simple rule. If you like somebody more than you dislike them you can have a relationship. Once you accept you like 75 per cent but 25 per cent you find irritating for this or that reason, you just have to ignore that 25 per cent. — Robert Powell

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves. — Iris Murdoch

Don't you miss having a man? Don't you want to get married?"
He [Patrick Sonnier] is simple and direct. I'm simple and direct back.
I tell him that even as a young woman I didn't want to marry one man and have one family, I always wanted a wider arena for my love. But intimacy means a lot to me, I tell him. "I have close friends - men and women. I couldn't make it without intimacy."
"Yeah?" he says.
"Yeah," I say. "But there's a costly side to celibacy, too, a deep loneliness sometimes. There are moments, especially on Sunday afternoons, when I smell the smoke in the neighborhood from family barbecues, and feel like a fool not to have pursued a "normal" life. But, then, I've figured out that loneliness is part of everyone's life, part of being human - the private, solitary part of us that no one else can touch." (p. 127) — Helen Prejean

Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line, — Ryan Holiday

Inside you is eternity. A human being is not so simple. We're told that we're Ted or Sally or Willie or whatever and that we grow up and have experiences. That has nothing to do with what life is. You are eternity. — Frederick Lenz

This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad," he said. "I faked it." He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. "I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they're not getting any results. So I thought I'd get some action going." He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him. — Jon Ronson

While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He's learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be. — Yann Martel

I am not the Messiah. I am a simple human being with the unlimited power of love and kindness. — Debasish Mridha

And yet, despite the multiplicity of times we've done it, it is still a funny, exultant, true thing - where for a short time you turn into something else and fly; where you stop fretting and wanting, and are simply alight with joy - and all while never venturing beyond the walls of your room. And I would put our continued success down to one simple thing. At the end of every tumbling session, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Thank you very much. That was very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. My dear, I am much obliged to you."
Because at the end of the day, that is the hottest sex tip of all: gratitude. That you've found someone who wants to do that thing, with you, and no government has yet found a way to charge you VAT on it. You can set fire to the sky, and not be charged a penny.
Sometimes, it's great being a human. — Caitlin Moran

Whatever they say about it, but being altruistic is not so simple for everyone. Not to look and sound like despotism, altruism must be learnt, and it's a long way, which in fact begins from our egoism, for really, a human can't love others if he doesn't love himself first. — Lara Biyuts

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat. — E. O. Wilson

Love can exist only after meditation, not before it. That is a simple existential law. Before meditation - only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows. — Rajneesh

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost. — Daniel H. Wilson

To B-major or B-minor: that is the question. Consider that the major and minor chords are separated by the smallest tonal step which is one half-step carrying in its pitch the gravity of all humanity which needs the major to recognize its relative, inherent tragedy which once given expression seeks the resurrection that only the major can procreate which self-expression gives beauty to the harmony of the major which then confirms the whole truth of the tragic minor saga which overcomes the hidden hand of destiny in the great ellipse of being and the greater cosmic void of nothingness which passage of time has sadly destined to be replayed in the same octave of the ineluctable modality of the audible which ellipse with such a simple twist resonates as infinity which is both meaningless beyond all human capacity for understanding but which holds within it the ubiquitous mystic beauty and truth of the pulsing human heart. — David B. Lentz

Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend ... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear
because peace and fear are both contagious. — John Ortberg Jr.

We should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street. — Alvar Aalto

If the way to the center were easy to find - if it were capable of being captured in doctrines or were subject to human control - it would not be the genuine way. If the path that opens the heart and the mind could be found by simple belief, all the true believers would be opening the doors and windows of their hearts with gestures of true compassion. They would readily understand the common threads in the words "Jesus was right," "Moses led me along," and "Mohammed opened doors in my heart." When the great way opens even for a moment the path between mind and heart widens. The heart begins to find the thought of unity buried within it and the mind begins to see subtleties that were impossible to grasp just a minute before. Finding the great way requires a willingness to surrender again and again, not simply a zeal for bowing one's head in the same old way. — Michael Meade

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank. — Marya Hornbacher

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. — Mary Shelley

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being. — Atom Egoyan

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human? — Edward W. Said

I'm nothing special, just an ordinary human being. That's why I always describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. — Dalai Lama

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered ... We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. — Elizabeth Edwards

It's very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. — Pema Chodron

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Do you love yourself? The test is simple. Do you look at others and see anything besides another beautiful human being? Do you see somebody who is more beautiful or less beautiful than you? If so, look down a little deeper and ask yourself why. It may be painful. The whys usually are. Do it anyway. — Dan Pearce

Men and women, both straight and gay, who don't consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being. These aren't radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me too. — Armistead Maupin

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. — Byron Katie

The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee. — Johan Huizinga

I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it. — Patti Smith

If you insist on reducing it to its basic elements, it's the sure and simple knowledge that there's something more out there, something greater than yourself, than mankind: a grand plan, a design that can't be comprehended by you or by any other human being, because it is numinous, it is God's design, something only He can fathom. — Eric Van Lustbader

Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. — Eckhart Tolle

Grief is not a one-time thing for people with chronic health problems. Just like people grieving the loss of a loved one find the sadness washes over them at holidays or family events or even unexpected everyday moments, we who are grieving the loss of ourselves, or our former lives, will find the feelings come at random - when someone mentions an activity we used to love, or even something as simple as spilling a glass of milk, or not being able to find our keys. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means you're human. And it's okay. Then — Kimberly Rae

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we're waiting to die. — Alan Moore

I understand the most profound and simplest Truth of all: Any time any of us reaches out, any time we pour even a drop of love, compassion, simple human decency (no matter how small; how seemingly insignificant) into the sea of earthly existence - we are, each and every one of us - the being called Mercy. — J.M. DeMatteis

The human being is so complicated in some ways, and yet so simple in others. Sometimes, we need complex medication regimens. Yet, sometimes, we just need a good cry. — Vironika Tugaleva

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands. — Hermann Hesse

Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth
nothing is so simple as that. — Susan Cooper

If we take a moment to reflect on human history we see so much complexity that it's difficult to comprehend it all. Yet, simple truths are obvious; everyone influences each other either directly or indirectly, we all share this planet regardless of national boundaries, we all require the same nutritional needs with the most important being water, we can easily wage war and kill and at the same time love and have passion for another. — Kat Lahr

The American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. — James Truslow Adams

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have. — Paul Fleischman

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas. — Baruch Spinoza

Being human was a lot more difficult than it looked. Demon was easy. Demon was simple. Human was ... terrifying. Muse — Pippa DaCosta

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. — William Ellery Channing

The single most outwardly identifiable trait demonstrated by a winning human being is that of positive self-expectation- which is pure and simple optimism. — Denis Waitley

Just try to understand a simple fact: human beings are human beings. Once in a while everybody gets bored being with the same person all the time. Be factual; don't live in fictions. Once in a while, everybody gets fed up; that does not mean your love has stopped, it simply means a little change is needed. It is good for your health, it is good for your partner's health. You both need a little holiday from each other. Why not do it consciously? — Osho

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody. — Steve Wynn

All fashion brands are about looking good. Being Human is also about doing good. And you can do good by the simple act of slipping into a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. — Salman Khan

In this sense every serious choice has a tragicomic dimension. For it is impossible to be a human being without choosing, and it is impossible to choose without value denials, and it is impossible to deny values without guilt. That is a very simple though, but it forms the core definition of guilt: an awareness of significant value loss for which I know myself to be responsible. Guilt is the self-knowing of moral loss. — Thomas C. Oden

The simple truth is that every human being should be born with basic human rights without suffering from discrimination. — Leta B.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or even most Muslims - were violent, the world would already be in flames. Most people simply want to live their lives in peace, with some degree of material comfort. I find it bizarre - and disturbing - that so many Americans imagine that being a Muslim somehow trumps human nature and makes ordinary simple people want to rise up and kill everyone. That takes a special kind of stupid. — Dave Champion

For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing. — Ben Ehrenreich

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. — Jeffrey Kluger

the details of anything you love are
always what is most thrilling, most poignant,
most important.
i loved her as she rose from bed and fell back
against it again, and all she did in-between.
when you love someone you accept them,
you become them in a way, and all they
do forms into you. their mannerisms turn
into truth- the way she holds her favorite coffee mug,
the way she laughs, the way she smells, the way her lips
curl after certain words. all of the simple things
suddenly become gigantic things and light up the world
before you like a flame thrown into the clouds.
what a breathtaking display. the way
the earth begins to dissolve in your periphery
and a human being replaces it.

no matter what they tell you-
a person is a universe when truly
loved and anything less is not
love at all. — Christopher Poindexter

Music is an attitude. It's a sensation to the average person, to the human being. And keep it simple, stupid. That's always been my theory. — Dick Dale

[Banning marriage equality is] discrimination, plain and simple. It's really not about votes. It's about people. I think it's the right thing to do as a human being. — Jay-Z