"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

"It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
— Albert Einstein

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are. "
— Laurie Anderson

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
— John Steinbeck

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love."
— Sigmund Freud

"The more one judges, the less one loves."
— Honoré de Balzac

"In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone. "
— Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic and Baby)

"“All sins are attempts to fill voids.” "
— Simone Weil

"You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature."
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry."
— Douglas Wilson

"Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism."
— Blaise Pascal

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval."
— Peter Singer

"Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it."
— David Orr

"We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you do'nt fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity."
— Fred Hampton

"I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh."
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship)

"The human heart is my school."
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Armand)

"...tell them that we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That’s why we’ve got to make sure we pass it on."
— Billie Letts (Where the Heart Is)

"“Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.” "
— Camille Paglia

"I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it sis my duty ... This is my highest and best use as a human."
— Ben Stein

"The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy."
— Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams)

"We are human, and we suffer, and unlike the animals on the farm, we are self-aware, and we know that we suffer, and it doesn't hurt more or less if God caused it or could stop it, at least for me. I am definitely of the school that believes God has bigger stuff to worry about than me."
— Jon Katz

"Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Zoo: An excellent lace to study the habits of human beings"
— Evan Esar

"If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences."
— Albert Camus

"--¿Qué es ser hombre, para vos?
--Es muchas cosas, pero para mí... bueno, lo más lindo del hombre es eso, ser lindo, fuerte, pero sin hacer alharaca de fuerza, y que va avanzando seguro. Que camine seguro, como mi mozo, que hable sin miedo, que sepa lo que quiere, adonde va, sin miedo de nada."
— Manuel Puig

"There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed."
— Vasily Grossman

"Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world."
— Chris Kraus (I Love Dick)

"Notre objectif final est de faire entrer l'étude du comportement humain dans le cadre des sciences physiques."
— Lord Adrian

"We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)