Quotes about human nature

“You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shirk from—the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment—that’s what you make them recognize, embrace! You are mankind, or man’s condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain.”

We are made out of stars, you and I.

What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there." Page 18

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.

Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.

He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.

Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. (p. 99)

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?