Quotes About Humanity

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, -- that we find we have (a common Nature) -- one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine.

A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

See how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.

Man is a god in ruins.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truest test of civilization is not the census, size of cities, or crops; but the kind of man the country turns out.

Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.