All Beings Quotes

“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”

— Wilhelm Reich

“Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings.”

— Donald Van De Mark

“For human beings must be served, not exploited, honored, not manipulated.”

— David Paul Kirkpatrick

“The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

“I do not see how we can help thinking about God when He is so good to us all the time. Let me tell you how it seems to me that we come to know about our heavenly Father. It is from the power of love which is in our own hearts. Love is at the soul of everything. Whatever has not the power of loving must have a very dreary life indeed. We like to think that the sunshine and the winds and the trees are able to love in some way of their own, for it would make us know that they were happy if we knew that they could love. And so God who is the greatest and happiest of all beings is the most loving too. All the love that is in our hearts comes from him, as all the light which is in the flowers comes from the sun. And the more we love, the more near we are to God and His Love.”

— Phillips Brooks

“Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.”

— Aberjhani

“Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality ... and extreme, grotesque immorality.”

— Greta Christina

“You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings toward Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just as far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it; you love Him. It is not natural to us sinful, ungrateful beings to prefer His pleasure to our own or to follow His way instead of our own way, and nothing, nothing but love of Him can or does make us obedient to Him.”

— Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

“The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings. It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal.”

— Dallas Willard

“Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we with our capacity to love that fives meaning to the indifferent universe, and yet most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy from simple things.”

— Woody Allen

“Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects
of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a
faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now
to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half
fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was
folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was
comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“The South, which is peopled with ardent and irascible beings, is becoming more irritated and alarmed.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville

“There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.”

— Mark Lawrence

“We need art. We've been telling stories since the beginning. As human beings, we need it for our survival.”

— Lili Taylor

“We want everything. All the happiness that earth and heaven are capable of bestowing. Creature comforts, and heart and soul comforts also; and, proud-spirited beings that we are, we will not be put off with a part. Give us only everything, and we will be content. And, after all, Cinderella, you have had your day. Some little dogs never get theirs. You must not be greedy. You have KNOWN happiness. The palace was Paradise for those few months, and the Prince's arms were about you, Cinderella, the Prince's kisses on your lips; the gods themselves cannot take THAT from you.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

“It is natural for us, as human beings, to look forward. Our eyes naturally look ahead. In this sense, we are made for moving toward a goal.”

— Daisaku Ikeda

“Each of the seventeen tribunals during a long period burned annually, on an average, ten miserable beings!”

— John Foxe

“I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted.”

— Marcel Proust

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

— Graham Greene

“My kids are the funniest two human beings there are.”

— Kevin Hart

“I'm not a perfect Muslim; I think none of us are perfect human beings. I do the five pillars of Islam, you know, I pray five times a day.”

— Sania Mirza

“Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“I like to think I'm a role model for women. But I also don't like to just limit it to women. I like to think I'm a role model for human beings in general.”

— Madonna Ciccone

“But why are we attracted to symmetry? Why do we human beings delight in seeing perfectly round planets through the lens of a telescope and six-sided snowflakes on a cold winter day? The answer must be partly psychological. I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance.”

— Alan Lightman

“Since Hollywood seems to be more interested in people wearing tights and using powers, there seems to be a fertile ground for movies about real human beings.”

— Ramin Bahrani

“The ruling British elite are like animals
not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings.”

— Lyndon LaRouche

“I am certain that children always know more than they are able to tell, and that makes the big difference between them and adults, who, at best, know only a fraction of what they say. The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole beings, while we know it only with our heads.”

— Jacques Lusseyran

“To grasp life and meaning, we assume constancy where it does not exist. We name experiences, emotions, and subjective states and assume that what is named is as enduring as its name. Human beings blessed and cursed with consciousness - especially consciousness of their own being - think in terms of names, words, symbols.”

— James Bugental

“Each and every human being on Earth has both the responsibility and the privilege of viewing themselves as Divine beings with the power to bring about peace.”

— James F. Twyman

“Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

“Human beings are psychologically far more afraid of bugs than they are of driving a car, whereas people get killed by cars every single day, and there is hardly ever a story of people getting killed by bugs.”

— Jeff Pinkner

“It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.”

— Maimonides

“Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments.”

— Antony Flew

“Let's be honest. There's not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.”

— Bob Parsons

“Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.”

— Helen Cam

“The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.”

— Vasily Grossman

“As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.”

— Huston Smith

“Whether that expansion is towards the beings around you or flora, fauna, and creatures. Love has so many unique yet consistent forms. People like Branson - he's an idea guru. Guys like Allan Savory - he's like Father Earth. Allan has literally discovered how to stop desertification and make Africa come alive with plant life. In each of its forms, love has an infinite scope of potential expansion, all of which I see leading to growth.”

— Ian Somerhalder

“America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.”

— Edward Abbey

“Today it is very popular to do a thing we call channeling. People are trying to channel entities and have these beings come through them. In my estimation this is downright ridiculous and dangerous.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Resolved, never to suffer the least motions of anger to irrational beings.”

— Jonathan Edwards

“Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "disposable" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised - they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers".”

— Pope Francis

“I've always maintained that it isn't the form that's going to make the difference. It isn't the rule or the procedure or the ideology, but it's human beings that will make it.”

— Cesar Chavez

“The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.”

— H.L. Mencken

“Have not all past human beings parted, And must not all the present, one day part?”

— Lord Byron

“I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of ... individualism, conquest and exploitation ... A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name.”

— Helen Keller

“The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!”

— Henry David Thoreau

“All religions are essentially the same in their goal of developing a good human heart so that we may become better human beings.”

— Dalai Lama

“As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.”

— Margaret Mead