1,378 Humanity Quotes

We need a little more compassion, and if we cannot have it then no politician or even a magician can save the planet.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.

If I say, 'I am a monk.' or 'I am a Buddhist,' these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.

Today we face many problems. Some are created essentially by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, economic status, or other factors. Therefore, the time has come for us to think on a deeper level, on the human level, and from that level we should appreciate and respect the sameness of others as human beings.

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

Harden our hearts to the innocents in the womb, and we have hardened our hearts to the need for compassion, and mercy, and fellow-feeling, and charity, and decency in this world.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers!

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.

Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.

Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.

Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut-a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

I too am a member of the human race, (but admittedly not a very active member).

History records no more gallant struggle than that of humanity against the truth.

Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.

Several times I asked myself, 'Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?' And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

The world is a bundle of hay, Mankind are the asses that pull, Each tugs in a different way- And the greatest of all is John Bull!

All my actions have their rise in my inalienable love of mankind.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

The ones who count are those persons who- though they may be of little renown- respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of god-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.

'It shouldn't be a republican or democratic issue whether we take care of the environment. That should be a human issue.'

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?

The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved they are Jesus in disguise.

Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say 'What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?' If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

* What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body.

Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

'We are Fragile, everyone. We all long for something more. Things are said and things are done and the pieces hit the floor. See how fragile.'

'A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.'

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

The older I get, the more I realize the importance of exercising the various dimensions of my body, soul, mind and heart. Taken together, these aspects give me a sense of wholeness. I want to be a whole human being rather than one who limps on one leg because I don't know how to use all of my parts. Intellectual, emotional, and physical activity are not separate entities. Rather, they are dimensions of the same human being.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, What's it for?

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.

If Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature, and make it obey.

That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

'Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority'

In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift - a more human face.

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him -- that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.

The human soul has sojourned in lower and higher forms, migrating from one to another according to the samskaras or impressions, but it is only in the highest form as a human being that it attains to freedom.

What your soldier wants-- really, really wants -- is no-one shooting back at him.

'Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.'

Our civilization is still in a middle stage - scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only.

The 'value' or 'worth' of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power.

Alas! for the rarity Of Christian charity Under the sun!

But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born - a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun, that pour down the rain, and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator?

There are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.

Little Fly, Thy summer's play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance, And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free! They touch our country, and their shackles fall.

Here the free spirit of mankind, at length, Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place A limit to the giant's unchained strength, Or curb his swiftness in the forward race!