The Human Condition Quotes

“Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, Steps

“Men are more resilient than that, I think. Our belief is often strongest when it should be weakest. That is the nature of hope.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.”
― Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

“The instinct that drives compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation, tepid despair... the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails.”
― Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

“Who we are is who we ACTUALLY are. It's never who we create in order for people to see. You might really hate who you actually are, so then you create a sub-genus type of yourself for other people to see. But that never changes who you are. The sub-genus type won't change your genus. The only way we change who we are is by looking at ourselves in the mirror long enough to make us vomit over our disgusting waywardness and long enough to fall in love with our strengths. But you can't just fall in love with your strengths. You also need to vomit over your hypocrisies and all of your other bullshit. And you can't just vomit, either. You also have to clean it up and embrace yourself afterwards. This is how you change your genus.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Expectation and disappointment are far from friends but they are close relations.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“The condition in extreme is identifiable but the less obvious version of addiction is still painful and arguably worse because we simply adapt to living in pain.”
― Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

“Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”
― Albert Camus

“Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“The human mind and what we've achieved with it is remarkable. But it does not come close to what we can do, be, see and heal with our hearts”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“He stared at me. “Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world—the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.”

Listening to my love, I felt as if we were transported back to the trail, staring at the inky field of ghostly stars. My hair dangling off our bed and onto the hardwood floor, almost upside down, I challenged him, intoxicated. “No that’s silly. We see the color of the walls, the same.”

“There is no way to prove that your blue is my blue,” he said.

And sobering, I began seeing how my love’s allegory was a hard truth, very dark—how our shallow bowls, differences of perspective, account for all declarations of others’ “wrongness” (one’s own rightness), and the sense of being wronged.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“Left to their own devices, humans will inevitably resort to baser impulses, to self-eradicating violence. Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be driven to destroy…Left to their own devices, humans will inevitably care for another at great detriment to themselves. Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be compelled to save it. It is not one side or the other. Both are true. Flip the coin and see where it lands.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Complex

“It's a wonder they ever get out of bed at all. But they do, repeatedly, thousands of times each. And not only that - they do it themselves, with no technology to help them. Maybe a little electrical activity in their toothbrushes and hairdryers, but nothing more than that. And all to reduce body odour, and hairs, and halitosis, and shame.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“It's only natural for the docile creature of yesteryear to become difficult today. That's just the way people are. You can try forcing someone to remember how he felt in winter and keep shivering after summer comes, but it won't happen. A person might not be able to eat when they're sick but nobody can make they give up food for the rest of their life... The trouble with people is they think they are solid as rock.”
― Natsume Sōseki

“Apparently the rarest commodities on earth are truth and honesty.”
― Ken Poirot

“Reem’s life was one of a lost past, a present she rejected, and a future that is up in the air, like a plane traveling between continents.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“In this worried rush, nobody stopped to see the sun appear over rooftops. Unnoticed beauty lost in the need to be everywhere, in every waking moment.”
― Mala Naidoo, What Change May Come

“We need each other. Sometimes I’ll wonder what all art means after the sun explodes and we go extinct. No contribution is immortal and everything we do is for a temporary humanity. Books will burn, aliens won’t understand our albums, and movies will have no viewer. But something tells me that the sun’s bursting is just an impatient star longing to get its hands on some beautiful, fleeting human communication. Cheers to giving our sun the good read it deserves. And more importantly, a good world.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There is nothing you lack and all you will find; we are one at the heart - just divided by mind. Don't let life pass you by.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Even the old rule of matrilocal residence may have been honored in the breach as often as not by this time. The able man could arrange a suitable adoption for himself, thus gaining access to traditional sachemship.”
― Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois

“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“[A]s an anthropologist, my job is not to love or hate, like or dislike, admire or disdain others. My purpose is primarily to understand not only how things are, but how/why they became the way they are…if I could sum up the most valuable thing I have learned from anthropology, it is this: the problems we have in this world are not Black, Muslim, Russian, Chinese, white, and so on. Our problems are simply human problems. They happen because we are born or thrown into certain contexts, places, circumstances, and structures that are often much bigger than ourselves, and we then try to make sense, resist, fight, accept, or give in to our circumstances in various ways. All our human successes and failures highly depend on our will, awareness, and the resources available to us to make individual or communal changes.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“If we can have dialogues, there is always hope, but no dialogues can be effective if we don’t ask the tough and uncomfortable questions first. We certainly can’t have any meaningful conversations when each one of us is always on the defense, or when each group sees the other as an enemy.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“The tragic sense of life has its origin in our determination to carry off two incompatible, but equally serious, ambitions: to search for meaning and to face reality. An intense, unceasing demand for meaning - the longing for life to make benevolent, beautiful sense - is coupled with the dawning, appalling fact that it does not, in the end, make sense in that way. Tragedy is the name for horror seen against the backdrop of love.

This is an area in which civilization does not reduce our suffering - does not make life more pleasing or comfortable. What is the achievement of tragedy? It is to present the deepest sorrows of the human condition: what we love is terribly vulnerable; each life is a brief, scarring moment in the wastes of eternity; our transient existence will be marked by depression, confusion, and fear ... The ambition of tragedy is to hold such intelligent fears in a ceremonial act endowed with splendour and grace.

The ceremony does not overcome our fears. But, unlike horror, it does not seek to stoke anxiety. The tragic view is, really, a determination to hold on to nobility, love and beauty - even while knowing the worst about ourselves.”
― John Armstrong, In Search of Civilization

“Selling & Buying"
Everyone is up for sale,
because most are looking for nothing but
selling and buying …
They sell life to buy a wretched living!
You see them selling with no shame or dignity,
and whenever you encounter
a sign of kindness or a smile,
you soon discover that it is fake
and for marketing purposes only…
You see the sons of bitches
and their children and grandchildren
all busy selling real estate
cars
bodies and desires
fruit and vegetables
countries and agricultural lands
natural resources (after proxy revolutions)
clothes, shoes, and things – both fake and original –
cheap gifts and souvenirs in touristy cities
iPhones with ugly accessories
long and wide lists of all things, big or small,
that are supposed to make them
happier
trendier
more attractive
and more human…
And between one sale and another,
they rest and talk about values,
the Creator, ethics, religion,
what is prohibited and what’s allowed…
Between one sale and another buy,
you find them discussing dignity and freedom,
theorizing the meaning of life,
talking about politics and revolutions
nature and the environment
diseases and chronic illnesses
the latest technological advancements
about everything expect the fact that
all the misfortunes on this planet
are because they don’t hesitate to
sell anything and everything their hands can reach,
in exchange for one moment of superficiality!
You see those who chase after and master
the game of selling and buying
in perfect harmony with the latest trends and styles,
yet dwelling inside miserable bodies
whose soul and spirit have long departed with no return…
Oh, how fortunate are those who learned to adapt
with this game of selling and buying…

[Original poem published in Arabic on June 29, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Sorrow in the Heart of an Apple”
I tidied my old sorrow, wrapped it gently in scented cloth, and buried it beneath the apple tree in our village orchard.

Seasons rolled by... And I believed it was finished, forgotten, even the burial site lost to memory.

Then came harvest.

I plucked a red apple— shiny, luscious, radiant with promise.

But with the first bite, I tasted it.

That same sorrow, aged but unmistakable.

It had not only survived— it had multiplied.

Now here I am, face to face again,

finding it in the heart of every apple.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“It is only through the possession of an ever-illuminating library that we can come to recognize and understand the horror and wonder of the human family's Odyssey and its quest for wholeness, freedom, salvation, love, and dominion over fire, flood, suffering, and every disease and death—from the river Styx to space. Without reading as an essential resource for survival in our everyday experience, the individual . . . swings in the orchard of time, an empty-headed scarecrow—gleeful in his wilderness.”
― Leon Forrest, Relocations of the Spirit: Collected Essays