Quotes About Humanity

The secret of successful treatment is not to become a perfect, shining star or to learn to be in complete control of your feelings. These strategies are doomed to failure. In contrast, when you accept yourself as an imperfect but eminently lovable human being, and you stop fighting your emotions so strenuously, your fear will often lose its grip over you.

For example, when a loved one dies, you validly think, "I lost him (or her), and I will miss the companionship and love we shared." The feelings such a thought creates are tender, realistic, and desirable. Your emotions will enhance your humanity and add depth to the meaning of life. In this way you gain from your loss.

Like the God in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. There's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. Perversion always says otherwise.

I want them to think of being in church as being in the middle of a work of art, a collective witness of fellow human beings, wherever they are and whatever they're up to.

The little everyday neglect of imagining other people well can add up to a lifetime of flawed, perverted vision, an expenditure of soul in a waste of emotionalism.

My so-called love for humanity, for instance, isn't something I get to carry around in my heart. It has to find application among the weird, desperate people who populate my daily experience. It has to put on flesh. If it doesn't, I might take pleasure in the warm, fuzzy feeling of my personal, private faith, but it wouldn't be appropriate to call it Christianity.

It is one of the fundamental mysteries of nature, this dichotomy between what is given and what we, with our minds, create. We owe our very existence as a species to our ability to delineate patterns. We can even see patterns where none exist – the faces in a sun-lit curtain, the Greek heroes and monsters among the stars. What else might the human mind be recognizing that is not really there? And what, in any case, do we mean by "real"?

In the end, it is not the power of the mind nor the strengths of the body but the instincts of the human heart that save the world. It is the simple human capacity for mercy that finally allows evil to be overthrown.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond

In times of war thousands of virtuous women are deprived of their husbands and tens of thousands of helpless children of their fathers. … They are torn from their embraces by the cruelty of war, and they have no fathers left but their Father in heaven…. Surely Christians cannot be active in such measures without incurring the displeasure of God, who styles himself as the father of the fatherless and judge and avenger of the widow.

We talked—mostly, he talked—about the war. He has no interest in why it had happened or why Germany had lost—his stock of anecdotes all seem to revolve around an essential disbelief that men could do such things to one another. And not just the cruel and violent things. In such conditions he finds man's humanity to man even harder to credit.

Logic wasn't the governing factor here. It rarely is in human affairs.

Danger is another thing that's more romantic to read about than the reality of blood and burns and the screams transcending age and gender and even humanity. Pain can be a sound, pure sound, and pictures can't prepare you for the smell of a man trying to stuff his intestines back into his ripped abdomen.

People think celebrities don't have to worry about human things like sickness and death and rent. It's like you've traveled to this Land of Celebrity, this other country. They want you to tell about what you saw.

For among the many things that warfare does is temporarily define the entire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable—a redefinition that must take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre innocent people and remain shielded from self-condemnation. And nothing is more helpful to that political and psychological transformation than the availability of a deep well of national and cultural consciousness that consigns whole categories of people to the distant outback of humanity.

And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men. —The Book of Mormon, translated by JOSEPH SMITH

What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.

Si un pays entier vous rejette, que faut-il espérer d'un homme?

Deambulando por aquella ciudad a un tiempo moderna y llena de cicatrices del pasado, había asumido que era posible dejar atrás los destrozos, no olvidándolos sino aceptándolos. Era posible construir una felicidad sobre un telón de fondo compuesto por sufrimientos. Pero resultaba más fácil decirlo que vivirlo y los seres humanos disponían de menos tiempo que las ciudades para volver a edificarse a sí mismos.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz. (Page 451)