Quotes About Humanity

Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.

Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'

A civilization is judged by how it treats the vulnerable.

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.

Human beings are not built to function in a radically unequal world.

You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved.

Love is the only thing that doubles every time it's given," said Albert Schweitzer.

Altruism is like rings in the water when you toss a pebble. At first the circles are very small, then they get larger, and finally they embrace the entire surface of the ocean. —ALEXANDRE JOLLIEN

Others, however, point out that science is incapable of revealing all truths, and that while technology has produced huge benefits, the ravages it has caused are at least as great. What is more, science is silent when it comes to providing wisdom about how we should live.

La bonté de l'homme est une flamme qu'on peut cacher, mais qu'on ne peut jamais éteindre

altruism. It is their object that distinguishes them:

I believe sex is a life force and I try to write about it as straightforwardly as I can. I try to let characters live within their desires and addictions, because most people are works in progress.

so many women having taken the hero's journey, only to find it personally empty and dangerous for humanity. Women emulated the male heroic journey because there were no other images to emulate;

Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling is really 'I'-'It'.

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

There is no compulsion for man to accept the truth. But it is certainly a shame upon the human intellect when man is not even interested in finding out as to what is the truth! Islam teaches that God has given man the faculty of reason and therefore expects man to reason things out objectively and systematically for himself. To reflect and to question and to reflect.

Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man.

Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the sum total of latent heroism which it contains, then we may declare that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary than now and that it is at this moment reaching one of its highest points and capable of braving everything and hoping everything. And it is for this reason that, despite our present sadness, we are entitled to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice.

A superior atmosphere exists, in which we all know each other; and there is a mysterious truth – deeper far than the material truth - to which we at once have recourse, when we try to form a conception of a stranger. Have we not all experienced these things, which take place in the impenetrable regions of almost astral humanity?

Why not admit that it is not our paramount duty to weep with all those who are weeping, to suffer with all who are sad, to expose our heart to the passer-by for him to caress or stab? Tears and suffering and wounds are helpful to us only when they do not discourage our life.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.