Human fragility Quotes

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

I am very, very painfully human.

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.

We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

I'm a human being, and I get sick.

Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.

Compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. We remain relatively weak for many years before we can truly operate on our own.

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.

The astronomer will believe that the most erratic comet will yet accomplish its journey and revisit our sphere; but we give up those for lost who have not wandered one-half the distance from the centre of light and life.

Nobody is strong 100 percent of the time or falling apart 100 percent of the time; sometimes you're doing both at once.

O, let me kiss that hand! KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

We are not as strong as technology's pull.

That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.