This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving — and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

To be human means to feel inferior.

Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was every supposed to be easy.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.

To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?

To be a human being is to have to come to terms with the fact that your time here is finite. Shows that heighten that fact all speak to the reality of our own existence—and how high the stakes become as a result.

Being human means having doubts and yet still continuing on your path.

The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids—structurally, politically, violently—the broad posing of this question.

To be human is to seek beauty.

To be human means you can mold situations you are living in the way you want them.

If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused — you don't have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

To be human is to think through metaphors.