Quotes About Humanity

Far from it being true that man and his activity makes the world comprehensible, he is himself the most incomprehensible of all, and drives me relentlessly to the view of the accursedness of all being, a view manifested in so many painful signs in ancient and modern times. It is precisely man who drives me to the final despairing question: Why is there something? Why not nothing?

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

Nothing is beautiful, only man on this piece of navety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second nothing is ugly but degenerate man-the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases, one of those diseases is man.

Si l'humanité a été stupide pendant des millénaires, on ne s'explique pas comment elle a pu cesser de l'être, d'autant que ce fut dans un laps de temps relativement très court : et on se l'explique d'autant moins quand on observe avec quelle intelligence et quel héroisme elle a été stupide pendant si longtemps et avec quelle myopie philosophique et quelle décadence morale elle est devenue enfin "lucide" et "adulte".

Notons qu'un soi-disant "sociobiologiste"-- ce mot est tout un programme -- a poussé l'ingéniosité jusqu'à remplacer la matière par des "gênes" dont l'égoïsme aveugle, combiné avec un instinct de fourmis ou d'abeilles, aurait fini par constituer non seulement les corps mais aussi la conscience et en fin de compte l'intelligence humaine, miraculeusement capable de disserter sur les gênes qui se sont amusés à la produire.

L'homme moderne, voulant échapper à tous les maux, tombe finalement dans tous.

The Buddha was not full of shit when he said the cause of suffering could be uprooted and that you can put an end to it once and for all. There is a way out of this mess humanity has found itself in. It's just that the answer to the cause of suffering — and the way to end it — are nothing at all like what you think they are or imagine they should be.

the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Final Solution, "9-11." We might even be able to rattle off the dates of these awful events—but the lesson, we haven't yet absorbed. And until we really learn it, kids will keep getting new dates to memorize for history class.

Rather than revering supposedly special people for being Buddhas, we should revere the Buddha present in all people, whenever and wherever it manifests. D?gen talks about learning from anyone, no matter what their station in life, if that person says or does something wise.

When we forget God we make as big a mistake as we do when we insist that our concept of God is the only one that matters. When we forget God we treat one another and the world we live in as objects. We fail to recognize that whenever we harm someone else or the world we live in, we only harm ourselves.

She understood somehow that she was lucky in her special way to love these events without the complicated, pressing question of physical love, to absorb life from the center and its periphery at once, so she could for a while take it all in with the sweet fullness of the entirely human and the utterly strange, without apprehension or fear.

The Viking Lander on Mars is a toy grown to large size, a metaphor of a dream; that dream of extending our will, our hand, our seeing eye to another world. It is not a machine, it is us.

Respect is not just about treating others how you want to be treated, it's about acknowledging their value as a human being.

Much of morality is peculiar to mortality.

painful—sometimes they cause irrevocable harm—but welcome to Earth.

We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs. ... We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.

All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

What do you know?" "Almost everything. That almost part can be a real kick in the teeth sometimes." "What do you want, then?" "What I can't have." Wit turned to him, eyes solemn. "Same as everyone else, Kaladin Stormblessed.

Humans don't make sense." "If you're only now learning that," Kaladin said, "then you haven't been paying attention.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

Is human nature to believe that other places and other times are better than the here and now.

I'm wondering if every person I pass has similar depths, and if there's any way to avoid the mistake of judging them so shallowly that I'm rocked when they show their true complexity.