49 Human Condition Quotes

In exploring what it means to be human, we often turn to words that capture the profound essence of our experiences. The human condition, with its blend of triumphs and tribulations, joys and sorrows, has long been a fertile ground for thinkers, writers, and artists. Quotes have a unique ability to condense complex emotions and ideas into just a few words, offering insights and resonating deeply within us. Here, we've gathered a curated collection of 49 poignant quotes that delve into the myriad facets of the human condition. Each one invites reflection, offering a timeless perspective on the journey we all share.

1. “Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.Harper: That's how people change.” - Tony Kushner

2. “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.” - William Shakespeare

3. “If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.” - Robert Wright

4. “Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. ” - José Ortega y Gasset

5. “No," I said, and suddenly knew there was something mean in the world I could not stop.” - Z.Z. Packer

6. “Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.” - Stephen R. Covey

7. “We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.” - George Eliot

8. “To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.” - George Eliot

9. “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves” - George Eliot

10. “[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature.” - Tiffany Madison

11. “In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.” - Aberjhani

12. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” - David M. Eagleman

13. “Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.” - José Saramago

14. “[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. ” - Steve Toltz

15. “People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.” - Steve Toltz

16. “We are gods with anuses.” - Ernest Becker

17. “Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.” - O. Henry

18. “It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” - Noam Chomsky

19. “There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.” - Jodi Picoult

20. “It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.” - Isaac Asimov

21. “Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” - Wallace Stegner

22. “We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.” - Boria Sax

23. “The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.” - Milan Kundera

24. “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” - Aristotle

25. “They are surprised that he did it, though, which shows you that the male mind expects very little in the way of altruism from it's fellows.” - Stephen King

26. “Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

27. “La foiblesse de nostre condition, fait que les choses en leur simplicité et pureté naturelle ne puissent pas tomber en nostre usage...Nostre extreme volupté a quelque air de gemissement, et de plainte.” - Michel de Montaigne

28. “If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.” - Oliver Sacks

29. “One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.” - Aldous Huxley

30. “I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands.” - Jim Thompson

31. “Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.” - Jim Thompson

32. “The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.” - Guy Sajer

33. “Art is not life, and life is not art; but the beauty and horror of the human condition exists between the two.” - H.G. Mewis

34. “Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.” - David Mitchell

35. “It is greatly understated to compare humans to an absorbent sponge, a glowing fuse; they are each an innumerable harmony, a living self that has an effect on all of the forces that surround them.” - Johann Herder

36. “I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.” - Peter De Vries

37. “A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?” - Albert Camus

38. “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.” - Toni Morrison

39. “...and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.” - W. G. Sebald

40. “It's a mind, it works by metaphor.” - Simon J. Townley

41. “Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.” - Brian Bowers

42. “Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.” - Caroline Knapp

43. “...because I'm sure that as soon as things really get back to "normal," once our kids or grandkids grow up in a peaceful and comfortable world, they'll probably go right back to being as selfish and narrow-minded and generally shitty to one another as we were.” - Max Brooks

44. “Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.” - Evelyn Waugh

45. “[At the scene of a murder]The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way.” - Shirley Rousseau Murphy

46. “We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take the idea of dying, unable to sit still.” - Lewis Thomas

47. “I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.” - Charles Bukowski

48. “Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?”He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.“No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right—that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.” - Karen Maitland

49. “Oamenii sunt păsări nemaiîntâlnite,cu aripi crescute înlăuntru,care bat plutind, planând,într-un aer mai curat - care e gândul!” - Nichita Stanescu