Ray Kurzweil Quotes

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

Nature makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings that it is doubtful whether she deserves most the name of parent or stepmother.

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world

Man is a fugitive from nature.

Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

Unjustly men hate death, which is the greatest defence against their many ills.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.

I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.

We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

There is a natural law, a Divine law, that obliges you and me to relieve the suffering, the distressed and the destitute.

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.