John Updike Quotes

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

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

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.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.

Consciousness is a disease.

When you understand what you see, you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman and child on earth, you will be wiser.

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

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

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.

I'm not a machine.

I am very, very painfully human.

Unless we possess high spiritual qualifications, there is no doubt that the events life throws upon us will give rise to frustration, emotional turmoil, and other distorted states of consciousness. These imperfect states of mind in turn give rise to imperfect activities, and the seeds of suffering are ever planted in a steady flow.

Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.

Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

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.

I think that we are supernatural. We are unique. We're the only animals in the universe that we know of that actually have self-consciousness, a sense of time and our own mortality.

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?

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.