“Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall. Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have…”— Jeanette Winterson, amazon.com
“Every sentence is a wispy net, capturing a few flecks of meaning. The sun shines without vocabulary. The salmon has no name for the urge that drives it upstream. The newborn groping for the nipple knows hunger long before it knows a single word. Even with an entire dictionary in one's head, one even…”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“What memory is made of I cannot say; my body, at least, is made of atoms on loan from the earth. How implausible, that these atoms should have gathered to form this I, this envelope of skin that walks about.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing,…”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“The stars all have a purpose that benefits us, even though we may never see their true form or essence. They assist us with their light, even though that light—in of itself—is old, weary, and meaningless. While their precise nature is irrelevant, their impact is phenomenal. That is how I see humanit…”— Jacob Geers, thoughtcatalog.com
“Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with passion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.”— Yehuda Berg, values.com
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”— George Washington Carver, amazon.com
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”— Mahatma Gandhi, amazon.com
“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”— Jorge Luis Borges, amazon.com
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”— Iain Thomas, amazon.com
“Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts.”— Lin-Manuel Miranda, gq.com
“Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.”— Shannon Alder, facebook.com
“Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.”— Helen Keller, amazon.com
“what terrifies me most is how we foam at the mouth with envy when others succeed but sigh in relief when they are failing our struggle to celebrate each other is what's proven most difficult in being human”— Rupi Kaur, amazon.com
“It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“The definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.”— John Green, Peter Van Houten, amazon.com