Human Limitations Quotes

Everyone has blind spots, and even the brightest people are no exceptions.

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.

If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms.

I can't be a savior. But I can be the best I can be.

Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.

If God had intended us to fly, he’d never have given us the railways.

We're not meant to be perfect. It took me a long time to learn that.

No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him...Let me, then, confess what I know about myself, and confess too what I do not know, because what I know of myself I know only because you shed light on me, and what I do not know I shall remain ignorant about until my darkness becomes like bright noon before your face.

What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses (“there is no free lunch”) and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitious social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

Your thoughts of God are too human

It's paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer, any child can understand.

I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.

No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty.

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.

Of course, mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know.

To me, it's the folly of man to make God human.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

Ultimately we may still ask, why can't humans design a perfect society?

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.