31 Of The Most Powerful Photos Ever Taken That Perfectly Capture The Human Experience

A picture is worth a thousand words. However, these 31 gripping images prove they are much more than that.

Warning: These are some of the most powerful images ever captured. Viewing them will stir up a rush of emotions.

1. Starving boy and missionary

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Image credits: Mike Wells

2. Inside an Auschwitz gas chamber

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Image credits: kligon5

3. Heart surgeon after 23-hour-long (successful) heart transplant. His assistant is sleeping in the corner.

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Image credits: James Stanfield

4. Father and son (1949 vs 2009)

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Image credits: Vojage-Vojage

5. Diego Frazão Torquato, 12 year old Brazilian playing the violin at his teacher’s funeral. The teacher had helped him escape poverty and violence through music

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Image credits: salvemasnossascriancas.blogspot.com

6. A Russian soldier playing an abandoned piano in Chechnya in 1994

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Image credits: drugoi.livejournal.com

7. Young man finding out his brother was killed

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Image credits: Nhat V. Meyer

8. Wife of a fallen Marine, sleeps by his casket the night before his burial

Wife of a fallen Marine, sleeps by his casket the night before his burial
Image credits: Todd Heisler, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

Katherine Cathey, who insisted on sleeping next to the casket of her husband, 2nd Lt. James Cathey, on the night before his burial, plays music on her laptop that reminds her of the 24-year-old Marine, who was killed in Iraq in 2005.

9. A firefighter gives water to a koala during the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, in 2009

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Image credits: abc.net.au

10. Terri Gurrola is reunited with her daughter after serving in Iraq for 7 months

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Image credits: Louie Favorite

11. Indian homeless men wait to receive free food distributed outside a mosque ahead of Eid al-Fitr in New Delhi, India

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Image credits: Tsering Topgyal / AP

12. Zanjeer the dog saved thousands of lives during Mumbai serial blasts in March 1993 by detecting more than 3,329 kgs of the explosive RDX, 600 detonators, 249 hand grenades and 6406 rounds of live ammunition. He was buried with full honors in 2000

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Image credits: STR News / Reuters

13. Man Falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. “The Falling Man.”

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Image credits: Richard Drew /AP

14. Alcoholic father with his son

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Image credits: imgur.com

15. Embracing couple in the rubble of a collapsed factory

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Image credits: Taslima Akhter

16. Sunset on Mars

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Image credits: nasa.gov

17. Five-year-old gypsy boy on New Year’s Eve 2006 in the gypsy community of St. Jacques, Perpignan, Southern France. It is quite common in St. Jacques for little boys to smoke

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Image credits: Jesco Denzel

18. Hhaing The Yu, 29, holds his face in his hand as rain falls on the decimated remains of his home near Myanmar’s capital of Yangon (Rangoon). In May 2008, cyclone Nargis struck southern Myanmar, leaving millions homeless and claiming more than 100,000 lives

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Image credits: Brian Sokol

19. A dog named “Leao” sits for a second consecutive day at the grave of her owner, who died in the disastrous landslides near Rio de Janiero in 2011.

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Image credits: Vanderlei Almeida / Getty Images

20. “Wait For Me Daddy,” by Claude P. Dettloff in New Westminster, Canada, October 1, 1940

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Image credits: Claud Detloff

21. A Russian war veteran kneels beside the tank he spent the war in, now a monument.

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Image credits: englishrussia.com

22. Flower power

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Image credits: Bernie Boston

23. A woman sits amidst the wreckage caused by a massive earthquake and ensuing tsunam, in Natori, northern Japan, in March 2011

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Image credits: Asahi Shimbun, Toshiyuki Tsunenari /AP

24. The Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, Holland, 1888

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Image credits: retronaut.com

25. Greg Cook hugs his dog Coco after finding her inside his destroyed home in Alabama following the Tornado in March, 2012

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Image credits: Gary Cosby Jr. / AP

26. Demonstration of condom usage at a public market in Jayapura, capital of Papua, 2009

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Image credits: Adri Tambunan

27. Russian soldiers preparing for the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

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Image credits: Shirak Karapetyan-Milshtein

28. During massive floods in Cuttack City, India, in 2011, a heroic villager saved numerous stray cats by carrying them with a basket balanced on his head

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Image credits: Biswaranjan Rout / AP

29. An Afghan man offers tea to soldiers

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Image credits: Rafiq Maqbool / AP

30. Some parents, likely now in their 70’s, still looking for their missing child.

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Image credits: reddit.com

31. Christians protect Muslims during prayer in the midst of the 2011 uprisings in Cairo, Egypt

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Image credits: Nevine Zaki

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