Quotes About Humanity

Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. Where better than in a flower, sweet in its unconsciousness, fragrant because of its silence, can we image the unfolding of a virgin soul? The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.

Les maîtres sont immortels, cars leurs amours et leurs peurs vivent en nous à tout jamais. C'est l'âme plutôt que la main, l'homme plutôt que la technique, qui nous fait signe - et plus le signe est humain, plus s'approfondit son écho en nous.

What dire consequences to humanity lie in the contemptuous ignoring of Eastern problems!

Al ofrecer a su amada la primera guirnalda, el hombre primitivo se eleva sobre la bestia; saltando sobre las necesidades burdas de la naturaleza, se hace humano; percibiendo la sutil utilidad de lo inútil, entra en el reino del arte.

Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart till man becomes more human. Perhaps they have migrated to heaven.

Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.

If I do not feel a sense of joy in God's creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the Way. I have not yet learnt to be truly human. For it is only through thanksgiving that I can become myself.

doctrine of the Incarnation requires nothing less. If Christ had merely assumed unfallen human nature, living out his earthly life in the situation of Adam in Paradise, then he would not have been touched with the feeling of our infirmities, nor would he have been tempted in everything exactly as we are. And in that case he would not be our Saviour.

However oppressed by my own or others' anguish, I am not to forget that there is more in the world than this, there is much more.

So far from being pushed into the corner and treated as a piece of abstruse theologizing of interest only to specialists, the doctrine of the Trinity ought to have upon our daily life an effect that is nothing less than revolutionary. Made after the image of God the Trinity, human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven. In

The way to God lies through love of other people, and there is no other way. At the Last Judgement I shall not be asked if I was successful in my ascetic exercises or how many prostrations I made in the course of my prayers. I shall be asked, did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners: that is all I shall be asked.23

It is right that man should acknowledge your divinity, It is right for heavenly beings to worship your humanity. The heavenly beings were amazed to see how small you became, And earthly ones to see how exalted.23 St Ephrem the Syrian

The old men used to say that we should each of us look upon our neighbor's experiences as if they were our own. We should suffer with our neighbor in everything and weep with him, and should behave as if we were inside his body; and if any trouble befalls him, we should feel as much distress as we would for ourselves"21 (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers). All this is true, precisely because man is made in the image of God the Trinity.

There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.

Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.

Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn't it? Didn't it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?

I once believed man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not.

The false game is to give legitimacy to the notion that there is a hierarchy of importance among human beings.

This is too big a word for human beings to understand. Like is more useful and powerful than love.

He had breath in him once," he declared. "He is to be treated with respect, no matter the cost." "Now is not the time for empty ritual," Holmes thundered. "Now is precisely the time!" Douglas thundered back. "When we ourselves are empty, it is the ritual that turns us human again.

Compassion is not a popular virtue

There's some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn't exist in machine experiences.

I like Halldor Laxness and Machado de Assis - people who try to understand the human condition by looking at intimate pictures of human life.

When we go to sleep ordinarily, we're doing something really private. It's kind of an intimate, private connection with our sort of physical humanity.