John Osborne Quotes

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

I was absolutely blown away when I first talked to Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan at how ambitious they wanted 'Westworld' to be in looking at the drives that are leading human beings over the cliff of existence.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

This was real. And it was me. I had lived that life, and I had died that death. I was staring at the very end of me.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

Chacun de nous a un jour, plus ou moins triste, plus ou moins lointain, o u' il doit enfin accepter d'e" tre un homme. There will come a day for each of us, more or less sad, more or less distant, whenwe must accept the condition of being human.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.