Hannah Arendt Quotes

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Death and sex are the dominant reality of our day.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

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

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I am primarily concerned with the condition of man.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

It is far from easy to determine whether Nature has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.

I'm not interested in showing the wish of what it looks like to be human. I'm interested in showing what it actually looks like.

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.

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone

Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know.

I am just another dot in the world

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.

Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence.

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.

I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

A man, even if seriously sick or prevented in the exercise of its higher functions, is and will be always a man ... [he] will never become a 'vegetable' or an 'animal,'" the Pope said. "The intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being does not change depending on their circumstances.