Human Vulnerability Quotes

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.

What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

I am sorry that as leader of the community, San Antonio and my name go together. But I guess human beings just aren't made of plastic and wiring and metal. They are made of flesh and blood and feelings.

A strange species we are; we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.

You can't help it as a human being when you're put under so much scrutiny by multiple people, not even just one person in real life, telling you something. It harms you.

I'm still afraid of things, obviously - we're human. But I like that feeling of being afraid.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

I'm very insecure. I'm human, just like anybody else.

He [Ernest Hemingway] is gentle, as all real men are gentle; without tenderness, a man is uninteresting.

The soul is the weariest part of the body.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

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.

In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings.

Grab love of life every day. Because we're all gonna die. It's difficult to live that way. Most people are afraid to. Or can't. I find it very difficult.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

There is none made so great, but he may both need the help and service, and stand in fear of the power and unkindness, even of the meanest of mortals.

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.

If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus