Quotes About Humanity

Music is the universal language of mankind.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

God is like us to this extent, that whatever in us is good is like God.

Thare iz a grate deal ov charity in this world so koldly rendered that it fairly hurts, it iz like lifting a drowning man out ov the water bi the hair ov the hed, and then letting him drop on the ground.

You cannot earn or merit Salvation by any obedience. It is not the reordering of your desolated nature, or making yourself a fit temple of God, that can save you; for at your best you remain a ruin.

Man alone can grow God-wise. He is made a little lower than the angels only, and is over all other creatures as a king. It is not his exceptional beauty, or gifts, or culture, that give him this distinction. It is his nature; and that nature is priceless and glorious in every single specimen.

Jesus was no school-man, was no ecclesiastic, was no heresiarch. He spoke the language and the truth and the religion of a simple, artless, deep-centered representative of universal humanity--true always, everywhere, and for all.

We know how much corn they [i.e., the enslaved people on Hairston plantations] ate, but do not know how they felt to see the sun rise.

It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!

He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.

The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.

I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live. He who has Love has God in him, and is in God - - because God is Love.

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.

there is a kind of business, called Government service, which allows men to treat other men as things without having human brotherly relations with them; and that they should be so linked together by this Government service that the responsibility for the results of their deeds should not fall on any one of them individually.

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.

At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed.

As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another.

How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.