I take it hard when an animal in my care suffers or dies. I take it even harder when the animal's suffering is the result of human exploitation or carelessness.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said. She laughed. 'Really?' The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
What a lovely place this world would be if only people would feel affection for everyone else, and all the ugliness of the human heart were to vanish - our envy of those better off than ourselves and our scorn for those worse off.
Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and myst...
You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.
It [predatory capitalism] is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitatio...
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Listen, Peaches, is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to a...
Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.
I have studied humans for a small eternity. Intent infuses their every movement. Road maps to their inner navigation, plastered all over their skin. Born to be slaves.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of ...
And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.
That is the flip side, you see, to laissez-faire parenting. It succeeds or not, throughout the animal kingdom as it does with humans, in direct relationship to the strength of the offspring. Some of us don’t need very much. Some of us need a lot.
The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomi...
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
...What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature." It has become a symbol now.... That is the way human beings deal with the world.
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
The essence of an individual is made up of both their soul and spirit. Spirit is basically life energy, while the soul is what gives a person the ability to feel compassion, love, and all the things that make one human.
Ghosts,” Doktor Messerli continued, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or...
Human beings are hard-wired to make relationships. We do so in many capacities, fleeting and long-lasting, between different sexes, both inside and outside of the confines of the almost universally accepted partnership we called marriage.
