Quotes About Humanity

You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.

Look, writers aren't perfect , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.

Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn't, wouldn't, save her?

specific fund, you see. It's a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common.

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.

Tek što do?emo na svet, rekao je Flober, ,,a ve? s nas po?nu da otpadaju komadi?i.

Others went further: on one of Stanley's expeditions, James Jameson, heir to an Irish whiskey fortune, bought an eleven-year-old girl so he could sketch her being dismembered and eaten.

I always doubt people... I've survived by not believing in other human beings.

We're wretches but we're still capable of this - songs rising up inside us.

You must never be embarrassed when you are moved by music?' ["Madame" Lilian Stiles-Allen] counseled. 'It shows that you are a sensitive human being, capable of much feeling.

Dad was not a religious man, and he once said to me that he didn't think he would believe in God at all were it not for the existence of two things: trees — and man's conscience. He said that without trees, we would not survive on this planet, for they feed us, clothe us, shelter us, make oxygen. Without a conscience, man would probably never have developed beyond a primitive state.

She suspected she looked upon greatness for the first time in the form of a dusty, weary, rueful vicar, who did things like hold the hand of an old woman as she breathed her last breath and throw his fist into the jaw of a man who slurred her questionable honor and came in the dead of night to sit by the bed of her maid.

Should I apologize for my species for trotting out the same compliment again and again? Isn't it better than having none at all? When you hear the same one again and again, it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that it's the only thing of note about one's person.

Why are people so cruel? What did I ever do to them?

Tales within tales. Dreams within dreams. Pattern on pattern and path beyond path. For such short-lived folks, the human kind seem determined to make things as complicated as possible for themselves.

One woman can't fix every wrong. One woman or one man can't help every soul in trouble. Doesn't matter how much you want to.

Folk are easy hurt, no doubt about that. Easy wounded. Easy broken.

One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners.

It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman's amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable.

The old man, who shuffled along with great difficulty, bent double, was blind. To attract the attention of passersby,he sang a heart wrenching tune. Every time my father heard the song, he said to himself that society must change.