Quotes about Humanity

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgiveable.

Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.

My true religion is kindness. That is a great moral position - practicing kindness, keeping one's heart open in the presence of suffering.

Love and goodness and the world's beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.

Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside? Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent.

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?

This is a hard planet, and we're a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help. When

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.