Human Perspective Quotes

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

In our traditional culture, people have a very different view towards nature than in Western culture. We consider humans as part of nature. But in the West, they talk about protecting nature. That's a joke because nature doesn't care; it's humans who need to protect themselves.

There is properly no history; only biography.

We used to think earthly life was horrible and paradise awaited us when we died. Now we have made earthly life into a paradise and we fear death.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.

For the resolving powers of our scientific instruments decide, at a given moment, of the size and the vision of our Universe, and of the image we then make of ourselves.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

Do not doubt that mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

American dog say, 'Woof, woof.' Korean dog say, 'Mung, mung.' Polish dog say, 'How, how.' So which dog barking is correct? That is human beings' barking, not 'dog' barking. If dog and you become one hundred percent one, then you know sound of barking. This is Zen teaching. Boom! Become one.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.

As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Globalisation means many things. At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world - it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world.

Usually as humans and especially as a man, we look at things in context. It's like, oh, I know what that is, that's this, or this, there's that.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.