Quotes About Humanity

No one can ever truly know what is in another man's heart.

even toddlers know that rules should be followed but that they can be changed. These two capacities, capacities for love and law, for caring about others and following the rules, allow our characteristically human combination of moral depth and flexibility.

Rather than following a [genealogical] 'line', I find myself drawn to all the people I encounter, including those who, only by the most obtuse reckoning, can be thought of as relatives. Every life deserves telling; none is without drama and change.

A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy -- human attention -- had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy -- the writer's and reader's -- across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.

The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going.

In the dimly lit basement hall of Saints Peter and Paul's Soup Kitchen, in the back alleys behind the bus station, in the urine-scented wards of the state mental hospital, I saw, firsthand, that it was possible to lose everything and still go on.

The best of men are just men at best.

On account of sin, God's image in us has been obscured but not obliterated.

We, too, could easily forget that the good news is not a message of "Do your best, and be good enough!" but rather "Your best is never enough—but Jesus is.

In all, the crew of the St Laurent picked up and took to safety over eight hundred survivors, an astonishing feat almost without parallel in the lifesaving annals of the sea, almost enough to make one forget, if even only for a moment, the barbed wire and the thousand men who died. Almost, but not quite.

There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.

Witnessing the pain of others is the very least you can do in this world. It's how you know that when your own turn comes, someone will be there with you.

In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates quest for man in general or man in himself.

Our minds must make an enormous effort to find the natural sweetness of life in its fullness. The way back is at least as long as the one that brought us here. For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and mans movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man.

No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doingin addition to caring for mans well-beingthey were providing rights for themselves.

Every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. But our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar.

Mientras que una gota de sangre humana se derrame en la tierra por la mano de los hombres, el verdadero reino de Dios aún no habrá llegado, reino de paz y de amor que debe para siempre jamás desterrar de vuestro globo la animosidad, la discordia y la guerra.

Cuando la ley de amor y de caridad sea la ley de la humanidad, ya no habrá egoísmo: el débil y el pacífico ya no serán explotados ni pisoteados por el fuerte y el violento. Tal será el estado de la Tierra cuando, según la ley del progreso y la promesa de Jesús, venga a ser un mundo feliz por la expulsión de los malos.

Thank you. You're a kind person. It doesn't cost anything to be kind. People forget. Kindness doesn't cost a dime.

my aim in writing The Watch That Ends the Night was not to present history. My aim was to present humanity. The people represented in this book lived and breathed and loved. They were as real as you or me. They could have been any one of us.

I can tell a lot about people just by watching them go about their day. And from where I sits in the crow's nest, a rich man and a poor man looks equally small.

I can tell a lot about people just by watching them going about their day. And from where I sits in the crow's nest, a rich man and a poor man looks equally small.

You can't turn your back on people who need your help. It's a matter of decency.