What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.
Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That’s what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn’t write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.
Happiness as a human condition is something I never believed in. I think there are moments of happiness. I don’t think there is a lasting happiness. I think this is unthinkable.
In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.
When I was in ’97, I didn’t know I was in a very major moment. But with the privilege of reflection, I do. And that’s what artists should do – they should help illuminate and reflect the human condition.
When country music is doing its job, it reports on the good, bad and indifferent of our human condition.
Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.
Anybody who believes and experiences their life and doesn’t have shades of gray in it doesn’t live where I live and is simply not in touch with the reality of the human condition.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
I had never heard anyone doing what my show does, which is put the focus on the human condition – whatever you’re going through, good or bad, right or wrong, straight or gay, whatever. That human experience is the meat of the show.
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it.
I don’t ever expect to be permanently happy. I don’t think that’s part of the human condition.
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness – and some happiness, if you’re lucky.
Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.
Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
I think the themes in my songs are very similar from the first album to the newest one. It’s all about the human condition and how we are all trying to learn to live with each other and survive love and life.
Those of us engaged in the practice of science come to feel a certain reverence for it, engendered by its demonstrable power to dissect, clarify, and explain what previously was unexplainable, and thus to improve the human condition.
My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It’s always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.
All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between ‘reality’ and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it’s not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.
Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection – without pretending that access itself is such a right.
As authors, most – most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it’s like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.
I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition – whether it’s System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It’s a group that I’m proud to be counted among.
Actors are there to represent the human condition back to itself. It’s never about the actor. It’s about the content. That’s what I strive for in my work.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
I like real problems, the human condition – twisted, darker stuff.
Human beings are interested in the human condition.
I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition… I think age and life, if you’re lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning, and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
The guitar for me is a translation device. It’s not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn’t a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination – a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.
We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It’s the human condition and human suffering.
I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction, it’s that fiction – the study of the human condition – needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
I’m very drawn to the human condition and the emotional aspects of stories. It’s what’s not on the page that I get excited about.
It’s what great artists do. They suffer and feel more within the human condition than others. They’re not better for that, just more sensitive, and there’s a burden to that.
I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.
Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write. I think miserable stuff is more natural to the human condition and maybe more cathartic.
If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.
An awful lot of actors shy away from the uglier aspects of the human condition. They want to be liked, which is a cop-out. You’ve got to go for it.
We have proven that you can actually move strong, progressive policies, grow the economy, and improve the human condition.
For anyone with half a brain they can see that this play is about the human condition.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.
I look for characters that offer me opportunities to explore some aspect of the human condition. I think a lot of actors would say that and would look for that. I’ve been lucky enough to find projects that let me do that.
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
I think it’s unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that’s the human condition.
Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.
TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.
To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.
Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.
The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
