Human limitation Quotes

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God.This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment.

We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.

What men have seen they know; But what shall come hereafter No man before the event can see, Nor what end waits for him.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please …. All history is the record of man’s signal failure to thwart his destiny.

To say that a thing has never yet been done among men is to erect a barrier stronger than reason, stronger than discussion.

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

Not everybody can do everything at a high level.

All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . . How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.

But I like to know that someone is stronger than I am. I want to be able to know that if I get tired, somebody is there to hold up the fort. I like knowing that I can't pick a refrigerator alone. God did not make me strong enough to do that.

Prayer begins where human capacity ends.

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.