Quotes About Humanity

Leben ist Tun und Leiden. Je wissender der Mensch, desto tiefer sein seelisches Leid.

Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood.

The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself...Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety.

Der Farbige durchschaut den Weißen, wenn er von "Menschheit" und ewigem Frieden redet. Er wittert die Unfähigkeit und den fehlenden Willen, sich zu verteidigen.

She (Patricia Higsmith) was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being…I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly…. But her books? Brilliant.

A really great man is known by three signs... generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.

I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

For the most part people are cruel, cruel if only from lack of thought.

Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up, unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate on the nurevealed secrets of private lives.

Will you take me home with you ?" I ventured to ask, emboldened by his honest kind eyes. "I have no home," ho said mournfully, "otherwise I would. I sleep under bridge-arches, or doorways, or anywhere I can; where I am not hunted away" "But that must be very miserable?" "Yes, it is miserable. But there are tens of thousands of human creatures that do*the same. I must not complain.

I wonder now that I did not die; but if everything died that is full of wretchedness, your world would soon have but a sparse peopling.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers. Victor Hugo

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.

Fair peace becomes men ferocious anger belongs to beasts.

Your lot is mortal: not mortal is what you desire.

All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism.

Only monsters would harm a cat.

You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.

We're not saints, and we're not screwups. We're just...people.

Being human doesn't mean you're weak, it just means you're subject to the same little quirks and foibles as the rest of us—for which you should be grateful.

a crucial measure of our success in life is the way we treat one another every day of our lives.

WHEREVER THERE IS A HUMAN BEING, THERE IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A KINDNESS' —Lucius Annaeus Seneca (p.3).