Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.

Most of us must learn to love people and use things rather than loving things and using people.

There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.

I feel like, God expects me to be human. I feel like, God likes me just the way I am: broken and empty and bruised. I feel like, God doesn't look at me and wish that I were something else, because He likes me just this way. I feel like, God doesn't want me to close my eyes and pray for Him to make me holy or for Him to make me pure; because He made me human. I feel like, God already knows I'm human...it is I who needs to learn that.

Empathy is the ability to step outside of your own bubble and into the bubbles of other people. Empathy is the ability that allows us to be useful creatures on this planet; without empathy, we are a waste of oxygen in this world. Without empathy, we are lower than animals. Empathy is the ability that allows us the perception of things around us, outside of ourselves; so a person without empathy is a limited human being, someone who will only live half of a life.

Do not let the roles you play in life make you forget that you are human.

When someone you love dies, you are given the gift of "second chances". Their eulogy is a reminder that the living can turn their lives around at any point. You’re not bound by the past; that is who you used to be. You’re reminded that your feelings are not who you are, but how you felt at that moment. Your bad choices defined you yesterday, but they are not who you are today. Your future doesn’t have to travel the same path with the same people. You can start over. You don’t have to apologize to people that won’t listen. You don’t have to justify your feelings or actions, during a difficult time in your life. You don’t have to put up with people that are insecure and want you to fail. All you have to do is walk forward with a positive outlook, and trust that God has a plan that is greater than the sorrow you left behind. The people of quality that were meant to be in your life won’t need you to explain the beauty of your heart. They already understand what being human is----a roller coaster ride of emotions during rainstorms and sunshine, sprinkled with moments when you can almost reach the stars.

So I was communicating directly with God? Absolutely. Expressed that way, it sounds grandiose. But when it was happening, it didn't feel that way. Instead, I felt like I was doing what every soul is able to do when they leave their bodies, and what we can all do right now through various methods of prayer or deep meditation. Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it's the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal--and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link with God.

If you love and care enough, you will give a lot, you will forgive a lot.

How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.

My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.

You are as you are until you're not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into action in the timing that is best. That's just how it happens.And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we're there.You're not a robot. You can't just conjure up motivation when you don't have it. Sometimes you're going through something. Sometimes life has happened. Life! Remember life? Yeah, it teaches you things and sometimes makes you go the long way around for your biggest lessons.You don't get to control everything. You can wake up at 5 a.m. every day until you're tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don't want to come to fruition, they won't. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it's not the time, it's just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.

Renaissance philosophers often said that it is the soul that makes us human. We can turn that idea round and note that it is when we are most human that we have greatest access to the soul.

In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.

Being human doesn't make us humans. Humanity is something else only a kind and loving heart can possess

There's a vast space between being simply human to being truly humane.

And yet, despite the multiplicity of times we've done it, it is still a funny, exultant, true thing - where for a short time you turn into something else and fly; where you stop fretting and wanting, and are simply alight with joy - and all while never venturing beyond the walls of your room. And I would put our continued success down to one simple thing. At the end of every tumbling session, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Thank you very much. That was very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. My dear, I am much obliged to you."Because at the end of the day, that is the hottest sex tip of all: gratitude. That you've found someone who wants to do that thing, with you, and no government has yet found a way to charge you VAT on it. You can set fire to the sky, and not be charged a penny.Sometimes, it's great being a human.

It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.

You can make heaven out of hell, or hell out of heaven. The choice is yours.

It is of immense importance, that first and foremost, people identify themselves as human beings, rather than as a believer in a spiritual belief system. Any spiritual belief system. There is such a preoccupation with where a person will be after he/she dies, that people keep on forgetting we are all here right now— on this planet! Okay, so you are on your way to Heaven, of course, whilst many others who do not believe as you do are on their way to hell, of course— but those are not yet facts! The fact that we do have, though, is the fact that we are all here right now, on this Earth, living this life, breathing this air, and it's about time we identify ourselves with the reality in front of us: that we are human beings and we all cry, laugh, love and hurt.

Everything seemed so unreal—so supernatural—and I had to remind myself that is was. We weren’t human. We never were. (Jessica)

Just because I wasn’t human, didn’t mean I could discount human life. (Eric)

Apparently the rarest commodities on earth are truth and honesty.

When you are dealing with difficulties and you feel like you don't have the strength to stand anymore, do not allow yourself to see that as a sign of weakness, it is just a sign that you are human. Allow someone who cares to be strong for you. It is easier to be strong for someone else than it is it to be strong for yourself.

I believe in the ability to choose. I believe this life is made up of our choices and their consequences— the good and the bad. I do not believe in letting anything up to fate. We are the makers of our own destinies, our own futures, our own paths. To blindly follow is an insult to the miracle of being human. To be human is to make choices; the moment you allow others to make decisions for you is the moment you do an injustice to not only mankind but to yourself.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

You just go a little crazy, you know. Sometimes. And why? Well only because your soul is just too big for you, it flies away somehow.

Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.

To be human is, primarily, to embrace that we are human with strengths and weaknesses, and that our humanity is preordained to seek the Truth, Good and Beauty as part of our humanity. To be human is to be an agent of peace, justice, and reconciliation in our community or society. To be human is to be heroic and generous in an unobtrusive way, free from any selfish motive, with no media to show the litany of our good deeds. To be human is to have time to listen to the story of a grieving soul, to give hope to the hopeless, to give love to the unloved.(Danny Castillones Sillada, A reason to be Human: Human Pathos and Compassion)

Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.

The day we forget the horror, Sam, we will repeat it. Never forget your past. It will make you less human, less than human.

Safe?” Her voice was small, timid and delicate. But beautiful. The one word chimed like little bells. Her first word spoken to me.

... but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.

It may be our actions that define us, but it is our reaction that changes the course of things.

I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories... and when humans are broken, they're like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many beauties that are seen in different ways, so many thoughts and visions and possibilities that form, which couldn't form when the person wasn't broken! So it is not a very sad thing to be broken, after all! It's during the times of being broken, that you have all the opportunities to become things unforgettable! Just like the broken butterfly wing that I found, which has given me so many thoughts, in so many ways, has shown me so many words, and imaginations! But butterflies need to know, that it doesn't matter at all if the whole world saw their colors or not! But what matters is that they flew, they glided, they hovered, they saw, they felt, and they knew! And they loved the ones whom they flew with! And that is an existence worthwhile!

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.

Yes, I value emotions deeply.Call me sensitive, call me weak, call me outdated, call me anything you may, but tell me the truth, can you deny emotions give life to life. If Emotions are an integral part of Being Human,Why do people suppress feeling them ?Does the bruising scare them ? Than I wonder who is weak ?

That's the most pathetic part of being a human, the emotions you don't ask for or want, they just rush you anyway.

It still hurts, but life is supposed to hurt. Too many people think life is supposed to be easy and perfect all the time. But there is always some hurt. It's part of being alive. You have to accept it's a piece that every single person carries. It's what makes us human.

HOME, which is the last floor for everyone.

Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you haven't met the inspiration for your main character yet. Sometimes you need two more years of life experience before you can make your masterpiece into something that will feel real and true and raw to other people. Sometimes you're not falling in love because whatever you need to know about yourself is only knowable through solitude. Sometimes you haven't met your next collaborator. Sometimes your sadness encircles you because, one day, it will be the opus upon which you build your life.We all know this: Our experience cannot always be manipulated. Yet, we don't act as though we know this truth. We try so hard to manipulate and control our lives, to make creativity into a game to win, to shortcut success because others say they have, to process emotions and uncertainty as if these are linear journeys.You don't get to game the system of your life. You just don't. You don't get to control every outcome and aspect as a way to never give in to the uncertainty and unpredictability of something that's beyond what you understand. It's the basis of presence: to show up as you are in this moment and let that be enough.

Don't apologize for doing what you thought was best. All you can ever do, is your best. Even if that doesn't work out, don't diminish your efforts. Don't diminish your intent. Don't apologize for being human. Don't take on guilt that isn't yours. We are all growing, learning and evolving. Take the lesson forward.

It's shocking the things we call love.

The notion that a vast gulf exists between "criminals" and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about "them." The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or a felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of the crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the 'hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up-failing to live by one's highest ideals and values-is part of what makes us human.

I do not believe any person is born knowing how to be human. Everyone has to learn their letters and everyone has to learn how to be alive.. . . .Maybe it's not a lesson so much as it's a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that's left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you're lucky. If that's what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what's said to you, doing what's done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you're all alone, you keep on cawing __hello, pretty bird__ at the dark.

A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer

I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not *just* a liar. If you take something that does not belong to you, you're not *just* a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not *just* a killer.

I'm not here to be small, to compare, to judge (myself or you), to fit in or to be perfect. I'm here to grow, to learn, to love, to be human.

Tears don’t make you a girl, but they sure make you human.

If Hitch were a person, he'd be Mother Theresa or Gandhi or someone who treated all living creatures with the respect they deserve. It's depressing how my dog is a better human being than I am.

Do something better and different that people know you by your work not by your name.

We forget that we humans are animals, inextricably connected to the world and everything in it. In the rush to bring GMO food to the world because it was good for us, nobody had asked the question whether it would be good for the world.

Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

There are countless reasons to be jealous. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to them.

I honour the clarity of the present moment, and the stillness at the centre of being (mine & others), even in the midst of so much doing.

Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.

The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen – that’s where the real apocalypse lay: in people’s hearts, their souls, their beings.