"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Humans see what they want to see."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed.
For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.
(Snoopy, at his typewriter)"
— Charles M. Schulz

"It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"It's useless to lecture a human."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - "
— Gene Roddenberry

"You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?"

"It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize.

"Must be a human thing."

"Exactly."
— Christopher Moore

"All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born."
— Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon

"Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"I don't understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can't they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What's wrong with that idea?"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Tent)

"Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters."
— Kahlil Gibrán (The Prophet)

"Were men can't live, Gods fare no better."
— Cormac McCarthy

"'You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...'

[...]

'Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.'"
— Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination)

""Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not, himself, find peace."

"
— Albert Schweitzer (Animals, Nature and Albert Schweitzer)

"There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness."
— Thomas Ligotti

"It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)

"I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals."
— Margaret Atwood (The Tent)

"We carry within us the wonders we seek without us."
— Thomas Browne (Prose: "Religio Medici" , "Hydriotaphia" , "Garden of Cyrus" , "Letter to a Friend" , "Christian Morals" and Selections from Other Works)

"Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going"
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

"I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness. "
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"And I dream of Michelangelo when I'm lying in my bed
I see God upon the ceiling
I see angels overhead
And he seems so close
As he reaches out his hand
We are never quite as close
As we are led to understand"
— Adam Duritz

"He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)

"I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky.
Two gulls drift slowly up the river.

Vulnerable while they ride the wind,
they coast and glide with ease.

Dew is heavy on the grass below,
the spider's web is ready.

Heaven's ways include the human:
among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone."
— Du Fu

"Humans were peculiar. They were by turns squeamish and appallingly violent."
— Eileen Wilks (On the Prowl (Includes: Alpha & Omega Prequel; World of the Lupi, #3.5; Dorina Basarab Prequel; Monère, #3))

"'Better than other people.' Sometimes he says: 'That, at least, you are.' But more often: 'Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you are not - like other people.'"
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Nine men in ten are suicides."
— Benjamin Franklin

"I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain."
— Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals)

"All things human begin with words."
— David Rains Wallace (Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays)

"I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can't remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise."
— Wendy Rose

"Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been."
— Peter Watts (Maelstrom)

"We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."
— Godspeed You! Black Emperor

"Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"They were all human beings, but
Like wolves sharp-clawed, for shedding blood. "
— Sa'di (The Gulistan of Sa'di)

"A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"We do not like the idea that any other creature can be better than we are. It is highly probable that if we ever have to face a superior race, we will die of it."
— Murray Leinster (The Wailing Asteroid)

"My home drove me
into the wilderness.
Few look for me. Few hear me."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?"
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Apes. The moon woke them--
round the world's navel revolved
prayer wheels of steps."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)