Tiny Human Quotes & Sayings

Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it's hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had. — Andy Weir

Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is.
Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012) — Nigel Hey

Not ever. Not once. You never know. You only guess. This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake. It's impossible. It's heartbreaking. It's maddening. But there's no alternative. — Laurie Frankel

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. — W. H. Auden

After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant's yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now. — Hope Jahren

The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always - the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. — Colson Whitehead

If we can connect in some tiny way with a human that doesn't agree with us, then maybe we won't blow up the planet. — Nancy White

Twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid, and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though different in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird's wing, a whale's dorsal fine, a gecko's pad, your own hand. Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. — Craig Davidson

They do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. (from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed) — Steve Almond

When we were sprung fro the hos[ital, we waited at the elevator with two other couples, who seemed as dazed and clueless as we were. We were all being set free to care for the tiny creatures and just figure this out on our own. Looking at our faces, I wondered how the human race continues to survive. — Rachel Dratch

Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"You told me once that you loved me because I was human," I said, my voice tiny. "Will you still
love me when I'm an angel? Even if I won't be human anymore?"
"Always," he said, green eyes bright. "Even if you stop loving me."
I felt myself begin to crumble and I left the armory and him sitting on the — Courtney Allison Moulton

He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitude - if that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn't built. It's in tiny intricate pieces, and although there's a book of instructions you don't understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build — Matt Haig

Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears
would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass. — Cesar Aira

It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you've seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we've-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus. To watch Peter North try to get a cigar lit and to have that sight backlit by memories of his artilleryesque ejaculations.13 To have seen these strangers' faces in orgasm - that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it. — David Foster Wallace

Rebellion? I don't like hearing such a word from you," Ivan said with feeling. "One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me straight out, I call on you
answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears
would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth."
"No, I would not agree," Alyosha said softly.
"And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?"
"No, I cannot admit it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems. — Lundy Bancroft

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*! — Alastair Reynolds

Spirits have cravings
they're only human (well, some of them are)
but the amazing thing about these cravings is that they are SLIMMING POSITIVE! That's right, spirits don't crave sugary foods, or fat, or chocolate, or deep-fried carbs. They crave HEALTHY food like raw liver and bugs and those tiny dried-up foods you find in old attics and the better-stocked graveyards. — Chris Dolley

The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the astral form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. — Annie Besant

You are an incredible child of God having a dream that you are a human being on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere. — Drunvalo Melchizedek

And as Sumi flipped through more, she couldn't help smiling at the pictures of Hauk holding the human babies and children. They were so tiny in comparison to him. He looked awkward and scared in some, and in others - later ones - he was much more confident. One of the most adorable was a more recent image of him with a girl around a year old. She was dressed in a frilly tulle gown that filled Hauk's muscular arms with pink fluff. Laughing, the girl had her hands tangled in his braids while she laid her little head against his massive shoulder. Tears — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives. We can see light in wavelengths of between 400 and 700 nanometres only. Above this small principality of human vision extend the unseen but vast realms of infrared, microwaves and radio waves, and below it lie the dark dominions of ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Similarly, the spectrum of possible mental states may be infinite, but science has studied only two tiny sections of it: the sub-normative and the WEIRD. For — Yuval Noah Harari

Iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca - "chilly chia." It's brewed up by dissolving chia seeds in water with a little sugar and a squirt of lime. In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they're superpacked with omega-3S, omega-6S, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. — Christopher McDougall

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
"But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?"
"It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting ... — Robin Sloan

A tiny architect works inside the human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may one day see the ideal and the hand touch it. Life becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen walking, and the person appears as the incarnation of all that one loved. The — Fulton J. Sheen

Gardening is the greatest tonic and therapy a human being can have. Even if you have only a tiny piece of earth, you can create something beautiful, which we all have a great need for. If we begin by respecting plants, it's inevitable we'll respect people. — Audrey Hepburn

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings. — W.G. Sebald

We were taught not to offer or invite aid, because, like it or not, helping is a messy, confused proposition; sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong, and sometimes you have no choice but to trust that the man holding your tire iron, cussing at your old lug nuts, is a deeply kind human after all. — Dee Williams

No, they're contemporary witch hunters, based in Russia."
The crease deepened. "Hold on a moment. They sound like assholes?"
I blinked, uncertain I'd heard him correctly. "I beg your pardon?"
Jesus grimaced and pointed at his head. "It's this tiny human brain-I have to have a filing system for all this information or I can't keep track of it all. It sounds like these guys would be filed under Assholes Who Do Evil Shit in My Name."
"Jesus. I mean, wow. That's the name of one of your files?"
"One of my largest, unfortunately. — Kevin Hearne

Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness. — Suzy Kassem

I don't eat animals. I rescue strays and take injured pigeons to the wildlife rehab. I carry spiders and wasps outside in a cup covered with a 3x5 card. It would only follow that I'd take pause when contemplating the abrupt and apparently brutal ending of a tiny human being's life, or even a potential human being's life. — Victoria Moran

Do you need hope? Look at the tiny baby in a cow trough. See the adult's gentle hands blessing the children. Hear his words of invitation and see those hands pierced with spikes. Contemplate the blood-soaked mud. View the empty tomb and the folded grave clothes. See him rise physically to return to his Father, clothed in human flesh. Anticipate his return on the clouds and your eternal union and reign with him. Don't turn away from the hope of the gospel: Christ is utterly and eternally preeminent. You need this hope to face your day; don't look away to yourself or any other person. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

If atoms were no longer tiny bits of matter but ghosts of swirling energy, if the universe operated as a whole rather than as a machine with countless separate parts, if time can bend and two particles separated by billions of light years can communicate instantly, disregarding the speed of light, our understanding of the human body needs to be totally reframed. — Deepak Chopra

What distinguishes a human being from a computer? The ability to add up numbers? The ability to understand language? The ability to be logical? It is, of course, none of the above. It is the ability to play. Computers cannot have fun. They cannot fantasize. They cannot dream, they cannot experience emotion or summon intuition. These rare, precious qualities come naturally to every child on this earth yet they tend to be seen, by well meaning adults, as faults, foibles and failings. In pushing tiny toddlers to 'perform', we rob them of the ability to imagine. — Jonathan Cainer

The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of thier own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate thier pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. — George Orwell

I had often wondered how a single human heart could hold great love - it is so tiny, and love so vast. The answer is simple: it doesn't. It spills over. It becomes the everything. — Jeff Brown

Intellectually, he knew that he was falling sunward, heading in from the Jovian system toward the Belt. In a week, the sun would be close to twice the size it was now, and it would still be insignificant. In a context of such immensity, of distances and speeds so far above any meaningful human experience, it seemed like nothing should matter. He should be agreeing that he hadn't been there when God made the mountains, whether it meant the ones on Earth or on Ganymede or somewhere farther out in the darkness. He was in a tiny metal-and-ceramic box that was exchanging matter for energy to throw a half dozen primates across a vacuum larger than millions of oceans. Compared to that, how could anything matter? — James S.A. Corey

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. — Robert F. Kennedy

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away. — Ian McEwan

All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot - we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising - why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It's the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what's already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell. — Leslie Parry

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole. — Evelyn Waugh

Could it be? Had I actually found another human being who understood that VD was not a day for celebration but a cursed, commercial piece of bullshit lorded over by a tiny cherub-shaped tyrant? — Samantha Young

You, me, & your papa are 3 of the tiny percentage of souls on this miserable earth who've figured out that playing ball is the highest purpose God ever invented the human male body for. — David James Duncan

Every word you utter to another human being has an effect, but you don't know it. If people begin to understand that change comes about as a result of a million tiny acts that seem totally insignificant, well then, they wouldn't hesitate to take those tiny acts. — Howard Zinn

How to describe what humans look like to us! I've tried to describe it a little, when I spoke of Nicki's beauty the night before as a mixture of movement and color. But you can't imagine what it's like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that's what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn't really "see" in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon. Well, — Anne Rice

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.

A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.

Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop. — John Wood

Besides," said Rigg-the-killer, "I don't want to leave the future of the human race on both planets in the tiny little hands of the sentient mice of Odinfold. — Orson Scott Card

Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically "meaningful," while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the "meaningless." Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it.
Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch, but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being. — William Barrett

So, no, when I mention "tolerance", I'm not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible about a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgivenessm as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock star moments of divine ecstacy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way - in some quietly measureless way - all the same? — Elizabeth Gilbert

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. — Chaim Potok

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

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is. — Daniel Pennac

In biologist Stephen Jay Gould's illustrative phrase, human beings should be seen as a "tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush."14 That — Matthew Calarco

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are. — David Icke

Seen from an aeroplane high in the air, even the most gigantic skyscraper is only a tall stone black, a mere sculptural form, not a real building in which people can live. But as the plane descends from the great heights there will be one moment when the buildings change character completely. Suddenly, they take on human scale, become houses for human beings like ourselves, not the tiny dolls observed from the heights. This strange tranformation takes place at the instant when the contours of the buildings begin to rise above the horizon so that we get a side view of them instead of looking down on them. The buildings pass into a new stage of existence, become architecture in place of neat toys
for architecture means shapes formed around man, formed to be lived in, not merely to be seen from outside. — Steen Eiler Rasmussen

Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that you've either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. — Rod Serling

What if you allowed your God to exist in he simple words of compassion others offer you? ... What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through our window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering more than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that? — Cheryl Strayed

If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.
David Foster Wallace — David Lipsky

No human can bury their past indefinitely. It's only a matter of time before you crack. — K.A. Tucker

I am endlessly fascinated by this notion that everyone has a secret. Some of our secrets are tiny, small things, and some of them are huge. Given that reality of the human condition, that's what our characters will go through. There will be some things where you'll just be like, "What the hell! How the hell did that happen?" — Veena Sud

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity. — Richard Dawkins

The Kissing Game goes like this, Shortcake. Press, retreat, tilt, breathe, repeat. Use your hands to angle just right. Loosen up until it's a slow, wet slide. Hear the drum of blood in your own ears? Survive on tiny puffs of air. Do not stop. Don't even think about it. Shudder a sigh, pull back, let your opponent catch you with lips or teeth and ease you back into something even deeper. Wetter. Feel your nerve endings crackle to life with each touch of tongue. Feel a new heaviness between your legs. The aim of the game is to do this for the rest of your life. Screw human civilization and all it entails. This elevator is home now. This is what we do now. Do not fucking stop. He — Sally Thorne

This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decision on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands. Who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up - if with your incomplete contradictory information you make the wrong call - nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake. It's impossible. It's heartbreaking. It's maddening. But there's no alternative."

"Sure there is," she said.

"What?"

"Birth control. — Laurie Frankel

I've heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above., with the Wall twisting and winding through the landscape and two tiny human figures moving toward each other from remote provinces, step by step. I think this is a story of reverence for the planet, of trying to understand how we belong to the planet in a new way. And it's strange how I construct an aerial view so naturally. — Don DeLillo

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird ... but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.
If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one. — Iain M. Banks

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

The different strategies and visions of 'reformists' and 'radicals' are not the only subject of major debate within lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer politics. The fact is that only a tiny minority of non-heterosexuals are involved in any sort of political activism. Various writers and activists have noted with rising alarm an almost mass depoliticisation of lesbian and gay communities in the 1990s. The crass commercialism of the gay scene and the rise of the so-called pink pound and of 'lifestyle' as a signifier of sexual identity (and human worth) has allowed huge profits to be reaped. Playing on the insecurities of people sells 'packages' which can include everything from 'gay apartments' to 'gay holidays' and 'gay clothes' to designer drugs. — Richard Dunphy

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law - the same right we have. — Ronald Reagan

Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life — Karen Armstrong

Spar felt a tiny thud on the back of his shin, as if a moth had butted against him on its flight through the night air. Wait, had that been the small human? Had she kicked him? He could not tell by glancing at her face. — Christine Warren

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer's dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer's campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing "green wire goggles." No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood. — Evan S. Connell

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women. — Robert Kroese

We were all too human then, the vast ocean surrounding us and the tiny island we inhabited. We were two small beating hearts in this world, yet what we sought now seemed enormous. What we wanted and what could be created between us, a spark of life, so small and fragile, was too overwhelming to fully comprehend. My heart beat heavily in my chest with the weight of what we were trying for. — Meredith Wild

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings? — Sidney Poitier

Just as today science recognizes the constant recurrence of simple, tiny atomic particles in all sort of organized matter, our ancestors had the intuition that there was a secret rhythm in Nature which was the same in every single natural manifestation. A crane dance must mirror star dances, and human dance is an alphabet to decipher the unknown. — Pippa Pralen

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect. — Flann O'Brien

Out of all the medical advancements in human history I'm still most in awe of that tiny little piece of toilet paper that can stop a gushing razor cut in its tracks. — Gregor Collins

The night-sylphs, all of them, were armed with what looked like swords of glass. The pixies and the tiny ones were armed too, if not with knives and miniature swords , then with their own long claws. The pixies were creatures the size of dolls, but with strange attenuated bodies and long limbs, mostly clothed in colourful rags, and with dragonfly wings. Their joints were knobby, and their faces more animalistic. The smaller ones were also winged, but looked half-human and half-insect, with touches of bat and bird. — Mercedes Lackey

The first priority will consist in restoring a sense of the acceptance of life as a gift from God. According to both Sacred Scripture and the wisest traditions of your continent, the arrival of a child is always a gift, a blessing from God. Today it is high time to place greater emphasis on this: every human being, every tiny human person, however weak, is created 'in the image and likeness of God' (Gen 1:27) — Pope Benedict XVI

Innumerable careful examinations of all kinds of stones in all parts of the world prove that the earth's crust was formed about 4,000,000,000 years ago. Yes, and all that science knows is that something like man existed 1,000,000 years ago! And out of that gigantic river of time it has managed to dam up only a tiny rivulet of 7,000 years of human history, at the cost of a lot of hard work, many adventures and a great deal of curiosity. But what are 7,000 years of human history compared with thousands of millions of years of the history of the universe? — Erich Von Daniken

If you stand before a canvas, up close, almost to the point where your nose touches paint, you will see nothing but a blurred image; an image composed of thousands of tiny dots of paint. Stand back from the canvas and all those points of color merge to form an image of beauty recognizable to the human heart. Life is composed of thousands of tiny moments of time. Stand back and you will see a life of beauty, capable of touching the human heart. — Pen

I think of the universe as an engine. Perhaps we are a very small, yet very important part of this engine. What this engine drives - its purpose for expanding and contracting - that's what I'm curious about. It's unlikely that human beings are even capable of understanding purpose; like a tiny cell in our body, it has no idea why it functions, it simply does. — Aaron B. Powell

She's like an earthquake in tiny human form, breaking apart anything and everything in her way. — Victoria Aveyard

If there is a true measure of a person's soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full of honest love and compassion, it has to be right there, in the eyes.
The Dalai Lama's eyes sparkle and dance with laughter and unbridled love. The Pope's eyes are dark and glazed, bleak as obsidian marbles. Pat Robertson's eyes are rheumy and hollow, like tiny potholes of old wax. Goldman Sachs cretins, well, they don't use their own eyes at all; they just steal someone else's. — Mark Morford

And suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views,are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan,by younger hotshot cells moving up from below. — Dave Barry

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see around walls, we can't see heat or cold, we can't see electricity or radio signals, we can't see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can't see something, it doesn't exist. Virtually all of civilization's failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: 'I'll believe it when I see it.' We can't even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. — David Wong

Once your eyes get opened to pacifism, you can't shut them again. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You may bitterly regret the fact that you happen to be one of the tiny minority of the human race who have caught this angle of vision, but you can't help it. — Muriel Lester

Gulliver describes a royal personage inspiring awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail. — Jonathan Swift

It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound. — Miranda July

There is no greater privilege in living than bringing a tiny new human being into the world and then trying to raise him or her properly during the next eighteen years. Doing that job right requires all the intelligence, wisdom, and determination you will be able to muster from day to day. — James Dobson

Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought. — Roy H. Williams

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times. — Richard K. Morgan

I know I'm only one human being and I'm only making one tiny contribution and it's nothing more than that. — Halle Berry

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides — Kim Stanley Robinson

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback. A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed. — Paul Feyerabend

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. — Carl Sagan

Because this exact leaf had to grow in that exact way, in that exact place, so that precise wind could tear it from that precise branch and make it fly into this exact face at that exact moment. And, if just one of those tiny little things had never had happened, I'd never have met ya. Which makes this leaf the most important leaf in human history — Neil Cross

The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they've gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and "race" are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown. — Bill Nye