Simon Winchester Quotes

The earth is such a voluminous, sparse, wild place that has its own rhythm that human beings try to control and strategize our way around, but the truth is, if you're out someplace like the ocean on a capsized boat, it doesn't matter if you have academic degrees, or if you're a martial-arts ninja. Nature is a bigger force than you.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

I'm totally human.

I have spent seventy years finding out that I am not God.

There are things you have to look at with those world-class players, but at the end of the day, they're not superheroes. They're still human.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

No mortal man, moreover is wise at all moments.

If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are.

The human condition is not perfect. We are not perfect specimens, any of us. We're not robots.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

When you see someone putting themselves out there, particularly when you see someone is failing and failing so passionately, it brings up this bittersweet connection to our mortality.

Nobody escapes age and gravity.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.