Human Nature × Meaning

Human Nature and Meaning

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under Human Nature with "meaning" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Human Nature with "meaning" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Human Nature and Meaning; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Leo Tolstoy, Carl Sagan, Peter Singer, Adam Smith, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspe…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

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30 Quotes on Human Nature and Meaning

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."

— Leo Tolstoy

"Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not."

"Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement, there are leaders — those who have understood the meaning of life more clearly than others — and of those advanced men there is always one who has in his words and life, manifested this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly than others. This man's expression ... with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which usually form around the memory of such a man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life ... within a given age in a given society ... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal ... they are good, if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad."

— Leo Tolstoy

"underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals. This one thing is that we take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty as we can. The first step is that we cease to eat animals. Many people who are opposed to cruelty to animals draw the line at becoming a vegetarian. It was of such people that Oliver Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century humanitarian essayist, wrote: "They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion."

— Peter Singer

"But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens."

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."

— John F. Kennedy

"Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world."

"India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma."

— Sri Aurobindo

"It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical herosystem in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible."

— Ernest Becker

"If history has any meaning for us, it shows that men will continue to use the best weapons they have to win. Throughout history, even when men have established leagues to prevent war, they have nevertheless restarted to it. Utopia is still beyond the horizon. Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."

— Hyman G. Rickover

"The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex."

— E. M. Forster

"Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world."

— Daniel Bell

"The strength of Commonwealth lies in its diversity and it to be mindful of bearing economic, social, political and cultural systems which comprise its membership … Its commonality lies in its connection to humanity, in the main it has provided an invariable forum whose members to open and continue meaningful issues of concern."

— Joni Madraiwiwi

"The meaning of life for human beings is to serve one another for the survival of humanity and the advancement of civilization."

"An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses - then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts."

— Brian Campbell Vickery

"Student: Drought, flooding and ocean recidification unanticipated for 65 million years all result from climate change according to over 700 of your fellow scientists so I was wondering whether you thought climate change could be an issue that would unite us all; left and right, moving us beyond debates, C-16 into discussions at the UN ??? meets here next month where perhaps humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning."

— Jordan Peterson

"I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation."

"So this is my effort to bring back the hope that we must have if we are to change direction. . . . I think to be fully human, we need to have meaning in our lives, and that's what I am trying to help these young people to find."

— Jane Goodall

"The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition."

— Lancelot Law Whyte

"Those who had premonitions of transformation believed that future generations might detect the invisible laws and forces around us: the vital networks of relationship, the ties among all aspects of life and knowledge, the interweaving of people, the rhythms and harmonies of the universe, the connectedness that captures parts and makes them wholes, the patterns that draw meaning from the web of the world. Humankind, they said, might recognize the subtle veils imposed on seeing; might awaken to the screen of custom, the prison of language and culture, the bonds of circumstance."

— Marilyn Ferguson

"But there isn’t an outside. Talking about “society’s outcasts” or “opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term “out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for “outside” to be."

— John Brunner

"The political and economic transformation which will be initiated as a result of Maitreya’s and the Masters’ presence will free humanity from age-old inhibitions and limitations, and galvanize it into a great leap forward in consciousness. Conscious, meaningful living will replace the present confusion, doubt and fear. A confident, courageous willingness to explore both inner and outer worlds will supplant the present weakening cynicism and make possible the evolutionary advance I have sought to describe: the emergence of a new and better civilization and of a new and better humanity."

— Benjamin Creme

"Who is this God? The god of the Jews? Those who say they're God's chosen people? And what of these Commandments? The covenant between God and Israel? And why only Israel? Because neither their God or their fables were ever intended for the whole of mankind. It is the folklore of one particular tribe of superstitious primitives and is meaningless to us in the here and now, especially since your God never even existed. So these laws were given by men after all."

"I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again."

— Peter Medawar

"Along the way, all meaning was lost except for verbal signals, the kind of signals any animal species develops in order to stay in touch with its own kind, call others to a feeding spot, or alert others to danger. Every linguist should know that language must be used to be retained, and the compilers of this report have warned that human language on Earth is also being reduced. As humans become more crowded, they become less tolerant of variety. To fit into a crowd, people must be similar, and Earth’s population today is a vat of homogeneity with only a pretense of choice remaining. One may pick model x with one curlicue or model y with three, the tasteless brown cracker or the tasteless yellow cracker, the actual difference in either case being nil. Any real choice among things of unlike value might lead to disparity, which leads to conflict. Ideas also contribute to disparity, and therefore in crowded populations ideas must be restricted to the least controversial, the least interesting. Children all receive the same grades in school. Workers all receive the same pay. Clothing is similar; Foods are identical; and with the passage of all distinctions the words for them also pass."

— Sheri S. Tepper

"As well as tackling isolation, there is one other area we must look at if we are to build a truly cohesive society – and that is segregation. It cannot be right, for example, that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths. That doesn’t foster a sense of shared belonging and understanding – it can drive people apart."

— David Cameron

"There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning."

— Otto Weininger

"Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning—or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge. We are nonetheless warranted in regretting our cosmic insignificance and the pointlessness of the entire human endeavor. As impressed as humans often are about the significance of humanity’s presence in the cosmos, our absence would have made absolutely no difference to the rest of the universe. We serve no purpose in the cosmos and, although our efforts have some significance here and now, it is seriously limited both spatially and temporally. Even those who think that we ought not to yearn for the greater meaning that is unattainable must recognize the immense tragedy of beings who suffer such existential anxiety over their insignificance. That suffering is indisputably a part of the human predicament"

— David Benatar

"The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity’ and ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose."

— Max Horkheimer

"Boys and Men do experience sexual abuse at the hands of men. The honmophobes distorting concentration on this fact, which cannot and must not be denied, neatly eliminates from view the primary victim of male sexual abuse: women and girls. This is congruent with the fact that crimes against females are ultimately viewed as expressions of male normalcy, while crimes against men and boys are viewed as perversions of that same normalcy. Society's general willingness to do anything necessary to protect boys and men from male sexual aggression is testimony to the value of a male life. Society's general refusal to do anything meaningful to protect women and girls from male sexual aggression is testimony to the worthlessness of a female life. A male life must be protected for its own sake. A female life warrants protection only when the female belongs to a male, as wife, daughter, mistress, whore; it is the owner who has a right to have his rights over his females protected from other men. A female's bodily integrity or well-being is not protected because of the value of the woman as a human being in her own right."

— Andrea Dworkin

Key thinkers on this theme

Leo Tolstoy· Literature Carl Sagan· Science Peter Singer· Ethics Adam Smith· Economics John F. Kennedy· Politics

Related ideas in Human Nature

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