Quotes About Humanity

How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow s hall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, -- is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men, then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of darker nations.

The list goes on. There are myriad versions of the talk because there are myriad ways to be human. And we wish we had the space to capture all of these conversations within these chapters, because we know they are happening, and we know people are hurting.

Humanism is not a science, but religion. . . . Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world's religions. —John Gray, Straw Dogs In

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fibre of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best as he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein's or Beethoven's, which he does not need?

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

We shake hands and part good comrades. But I have to get out of here, good fellows or no good fellows. Too much fellow feeling makes me nervous, to tell the truth.

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.

She suggested that...I should examine what I had been trying to shoot at and punch and kill for so long- whether or not I had, perhaps, denied some more gentle part of my nature, and if so, what had it cost me. And don't get a tattoo for your forehead, she said, smiling. It's entirely unnecessary. As proof, she held her hands in front of her. Wiggled her fingers and smiled. Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she has said; the gods both laughed and wept.

What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

that we need to be charitable to one another because it's the right thing to do, "not because it allows us to rack up mileage points for our trip to some imaginary heaven.

Prophet. Kahlil Gibran.

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give I give myself.