Inspiration often comes from the words of those who have experienced life’s ups and downs and emerged stronger. These 64 handpicked quotes celebrate the resilience, courage, and wisdom of the human spirit. Whether you’re seeking motivation, encouragement, or a fresh perspective, these powerful sayings are sure to uplift and inspire you on your journey.
1. “You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?""It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize.""Must be a human thing.""Exactly.” - Christopher Moore
2. “Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.” - Dag Hammarskjöld
3. “My home drove meinto the wilderness.Few look for me. Few hear me.” - Dag Hammarskjöld
4. “You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...'[...]Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.” - Alfred Bester
5. “One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.” - Douglas Adams
6. “I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.” - Margaret Atwood
7. “Four legs good, two legs bad.” - George Orwell
8. “He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.” - T.H. White
9. “I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can't remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise.” - Wendy Rose
10. “Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.” - Peter Watts
11. “I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.” - Isabel Allende
12. “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.” - Al-Maʿarri
13. “Music is what tell us that the human race is greater than we realize.” - Napoleon
14. “All things human begin with words.” - David Rains Wallace
15. “Glory: I look around at this world you're so eager to be a part of and all I see is six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who's not crazy? Look around, everyone's drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out 'cause they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind, 'cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts.” - Douglas Petrie
16. “Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…” - Arundhati Roy
17. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott
18. “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.” - Anthony Burgess
19. “(about cats) They also resist our calls to come, to move, to obey, to present themselves, to do all the things that dogs do so easily. This drives some people crazy. Cats do not even care what drives us crazy!” - Jeffery Masson
20. “Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer” - John Keats
21. “Humans, we just hop out of things, off things. We splatter ourselves in inappropriate places. Because we have nothing to live for. Because we want to destroy what we can. Because we want to be something we can’t. Because we don’t really believe we can die.” - Deb Olin Unferth
22. “People are so stupid. They think they've got the whole puzzle figured out, but they're really so far off.” - laurie faria stolarz
23. “What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.” - Orson Scott Card
24. “Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.” - Daniel Quinn
25. “I have a dream, humans were part of aliens on earth.I also dream, that some humans are really indigenous.” - Toba Beta
26. “Now may every living thing, young or old,weak or strong, living near or far, known orunknown, living or departed or yet unborn,may every living thing be full of bliss.” - Anonymous
27. “Curious creatures we mortals are-how we do not know what we want, or how to get it if we do.” - Jude Morgan
28. “You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?” - Terry Pratchett
29. “A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!” - Marc Bekoff
30. “We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.” - Nina LaCour
31. “We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
32. “For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.” - Philip Pullman
33. “Mrs. Horowitz said, "It is inexcusable that humans think they can murder other animals because they murder themselves. I must tell you, I hate humans. They terrify me.""They should," I continued. "I interviewed Yehudi Menuhin the other day.” - David Dubal
34. “In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can--forgetting to ask whether we should.” - Wayne Pacelle
35. “I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.” - Susan Sontag
36. “We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.” - GaryLFrancione
37. “Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.” - Tom Regan
38. “If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.” - N.K. Jemisin
39. “Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better” - Ron Rash
40. “Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.” - Fulton J. Sheen
41. “that was bad; i shouldn't have done thatto prevent you from entering a catatonic statei am going to maintain a calm facial expressionwith crinkly eyes and an overall friendly demeanori believe in a human being that is not upseti believe if you are working i should not be insaneor upset--why am i ever insane or upset and not working?i vacuumed the entire house this morningi cleaned the kitchen and the computer roomand i made you a meat helmet with computer paperthe opportunity for change exists in each moment, all moments are aloneand separate from other moments, and there are a limited number of momentsand the idea of change is a delusion of positive or negative thinkingyour hands are covering your faceand your body moves like a statuewhen i try to manipulate an appendageif i could just get you to cry tears of joy one more time” - Tao Lin
42. “People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.” - Emma Donoghue
43. “We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library” - Carl Sagan
44. “Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.” - Mark Kurlansky
45. “The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.” - Andrew Rimas Evan D.G. Fraser
46. “The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.""So?""So that's what art is, for the artist," said Crake. "An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.""Your analogy falls down when it comes to female artists," said Jimmy. "They're not in it to get laid. They'd gain no biological advantage from amplifying themselves, since potential mates would be deterred rather than attracted by this sort of amplification. Men aren't frogs, they don't want women who are ten times bigger than them.""Female artists are biologically confused," said Crake.” - Margaret Atwood
47. “When we perceive aliens as a joke to be laughed at,they feel so pity for us on the success of their plans.” - Toba Beta
48. “Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.” - Steven Pinker
49. “Ο άνθρωπος βλέπει, ακούει, μιλάει σωστά μόνο όταν ενδιαφέρεται για τη σύνδεση με το περιβάλλον, με τους άλλους ανθρώπους.” - Άλφρεντ Άντλερ
50. “Where is an intimate friend who’ll hear the secret from me straight out– of what human beings have been from the moment they began? They are born of toil and molded from the clay of sorrow.They wander the world for a time, then set off.” - Omar Khayyám
51. “It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.” - Yann Martel
52. “I think it is the duty of all human beings, as intelligent and communicative beings, to learn all the ideas thought up before ours and use them as a means to think up new ones.” - Jonathan Culver
53. “The longer I do my job ... the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.” - John Green
54. “Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine” - Cassandra Clare
55. “Humans - a renewable resource.” - Carrie Vaughn
56. “I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.” - Belinda Jeffrey
57. “Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.” - Nicolas Chamfort
58. “People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.” - Michael Pryor
59. “Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.” - Mark Twain
60. “Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.” - john gray
61. “Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.” - Karl Ove Knausgård
62. “Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there where we didn't expect it. WHACK! So, we whack that mole. Oops! We're so smart that we're a menace.” - Robert Buettner
63. “MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.” - Ambrose Bierce
64. “Humans were always surprising me.” - Stephenie Meyer
