Quotes About Humanity

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

Who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing: the one which befalls man when he casts his glance at the mute cosmos, at its dark spaces and monotonous drama, or the one that besets man exchanging glances with his fellow man in silence?

Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visable in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

Tout ce que je sais, c'est qu'il n'existe pas de héros dans ce monde. Pas vraiment. Rien que des hommes et des femmes devenus vieux et fatigués qui n'ont plus la force de lutter pour ce qu'ils aiment.

In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.

Never forget, grandchildren, that we must always see all other people as human beings, worthy of respect.

Our ancestors saw what war does to human beings. When we must fight other humans, injure and kill them, we also injure a part of ourselves. Our spirits become sick from contact with the enemy.

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

Tragedy is an unfinished comedy.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.

The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city - so is humanity entire - only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

If a being from another world were to ask you, How can I learn what it's like to be human? a good answer would be, Study mythology.

the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama ?akyam?ni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients

a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe.