What It Means To Be Human Quotes

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

The development of willpower -I will, I won’t and I want- may define what it means to be human.

Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth…. A mother’s love isn’t clichГ©, it’s universal. These things are archetypes. They’re the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human.

I think that most of us would say that ubuntu basically speaks about what it means to be human.

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

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? I’m not sure. That’s my answer: I’m not sure.

Running is the heart of what it means to be human.

I feel most people’s sexuality is enormously complicated. That’s what it means to be human. Wouldn’t it be great if we honored that complexity rather than turn it into gossip or ridicule? Wouldn’t it be great if we accepted sexual diversity, in ourselves and others, without condemning it?

Art and culture are nonetheless vital, essential even, to what it means to be human, yet digital abundance has diminished our sense of their worth.

If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

I can’t remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.