Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize...
A kiss is such an amazing thing -- So simple, so complex. The only human act that gives while it receives. Mouth to mouth, it almost seems the eating of one another. Maybe that’s all we are, food for each other. Why, I believe there’s a poem in t...
The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.” Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong,...
A human hires a hit man to kill his cousin for money, boring. That same hit man botches the job twice, funny. Then the desperate hit man sends a ghoul after the girl to finish things up, my curiosity's piqued. That same ghoul ends up with his head cu...
My book was not written in hate for Christians or disdain for the principles often associated with Jesus Christ—instead it was inspired by the ignorance that faith and religion often breed in humanity; the type of ignorance that allows people to se...
The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he w...
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to per...
Ethan thought he understood how a propaganda-stuffed young soldier must feel the first time in combat, stumbling by some sudden chance over his enemy's human face. He had gloried for a red moment in his power to break her. Now he stood foolishly with...
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishab...
If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is ...
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ...
It's easier, somehow, if there's a reason for tragedy - lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There's something we recognize as human, a motive toward whi...
And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and...
The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of ...
We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, bu...
In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone...
In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form...
That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was...
The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social ...
Like most people, my views about ghosts and haunted places were traditional while growing up. I believed ghosts were human spirits. Not that I talked to many people about the subject or my experiences. I assumed people would think I was weird.