Quotes About Humanity

Love was what made life worth living. Not the pursuit of pleasure, but love. Love, which involved the full spectrum of human emotions.

No one deserved to be totally disregarded, as though their very existence was of no significance. Everyone deserved to be noticed. To be treated with respect. To be listened to. To be recognized as a fellow human being.

You know what I think? Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent -- salt of the earth! Saints! Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle, just trying to get by.

We are none of us born into Eden, Doc said reasonably. world's plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what's the best way to play a bad hand?...

It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, Well, you screwed up. Everybody screws up. It's okay. His greatest satisfaction as a priest was to grant absolution, to help people forgive themselves for not being perfect, make amends, and get on with life.

A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.

We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦

I've seen what human beings can do- You've seen what... but not why! That's where God is, Anne. In the why of it - in the meaning

It is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of all human beings who have ever lived were or currently are Pagans.

Over days and weeks and months, he helped me feel that I was part of humanity, and not with his kindness alone; it was his silliness, his humor, his dirtiness that rekindled my spirit.

But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.

Today I'm Yours." It was a crude and romantic song. But human feeling is crude and romantic.

Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.

The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Still, a living, breathing human being--even a boneheaded or barely articulate one--conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering--what Shakespeare called the 'poor, bare, forked animal'--compels us all; we're all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.

To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.

But I still feel awe for us—yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind. And

My grandma Ruth used to say there's a little felon in the best of us.

The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough. The End of Anthropocentrism?

This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It

Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected

You don't want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don't want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway it's the same old story - - - a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world. (from, Dogfish)

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.