Quotes About Humanity

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère[Hypocrite reader—my double—my brother]!

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.

Let me explain something to you, Monsieur Bernard. Back in 1940, when this hell began, I realized that my first duty as a Christian was to overcome my self-centeredness, that I had to inconvenience myself when one of my human brethren was in danger—whoever he may be, or whether he was a born Frenchman or not. I've simply decided not to turn my back.

Hardship had bred pure self-interest, setting group against group, neighbor against neighbor, and even friend against friend. People

The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.

I have lost all faith in the steadfastness of human resolves.

Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.

I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.

That's all any of us are: amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.

Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Who feeds a hungry animal feeds his own soul.

More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness.

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.

One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don't know the first thing about them.

We must, however, acknowledge as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.