Quotes About Humanity

I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?

El sufrimiento no aumenta por el número: un cuerpo puede contener todo el sufrimiento que puede sentir el mundo.

When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He

There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no prose at all. He knew.

One can't always be wise, can one, in a world like this?

Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.

what experience had taught him- that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

he forgot for the while what experience had taught him-that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Christ had died for this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste

She had a lot to learn, in the way of books and music and how to dress and talk, but she would never have to learn humanity.

Why [...] do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, while on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly- he didn't seem to expect some reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people.

When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God.

Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

wasn't only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.

Why did you give Querry Deo Gratias?' 'He's cured, but he's a burnt-out case, and I don't want to send him away. He can sweep a floor and make a bed without fingers or toes.' 'Our visitors are sometimes fastidious.' 'I assure you Querry doesn't mind. In fact he asked for him.

Sooner or later,' Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, 'one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.