Quotes About Humanity

O'Connor had a knack for bringing a personal - and winning - touch to a situation when people least expected it.

In the monastic mind, work is not for profit. In the monastic mentality work is for giving, not just for gaining. In monastic spirituality, other people have a claim on what we do. Work is not a private enterprise. Work is not to enable me to get ahead; the purpose of work is to enable me to get more human and to make my world more just.

The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.

We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

No one inside will ever disappear. We're all real. We all matter.

A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another's pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.

There is evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology, neuroscience, and many other fields that we need to abandon our old misanthropic (and misogynist) notions for a sweeping new view of human nature.

if we manipulate others into not sharing so we don't have to hear, so we don't have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.

Birdfoot's Grampa The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. ******** The rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can't save them all accept it, get back in we've got places to go. But the leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.

Poverty doesn't make anyone an inferior being.

We are such idiots, We think everyone else has it all figured out. But we're all stumbling around in dark rooms bumping into furniture and stifling our cries so no one will know.

My humanity includes not just what I am at the present moment, but what I can be. I am also my future, To exclude the potential from the real, and identify the real only with what is already actualized is another form of reductionism. -Sexuality and Spiritual Growth

Kindness must be the highest virtue--don't let me forget that ever. Were I to strive for one thing only 'twould be to be kind to others, as you are, Catherine.

A willingness to lose one's self in a story was the first step to learning compassion, to appreciating other cultures, to realizing what possibilities the world held for people who kept at life despite the odds.

Civilization must be preserved,' says he. 'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.

Deborah'?n, insan maddesi ta??sa bile, kendisiyle insan ?rk?n?n öteki üyeleri aras?ndaki mesafenin ne denli büyük geldiÄŸini bu insanlara anlatmas? olanaks?zd?.

Ä°nsanlar yeni kuramlara, yeni deneylere inanm?? gibi görünüyorlard?, ama inançlar? çoÄŸun, biraz kaz?y?nca alt?ndan on binlerce kuÅŸa??n korkular?n?n ve düÅŸlemlerinin bir uzant?s? olan, kat?ks?z ve içten bir dehÅŸetin ortaya ç?kt??? bir yald?zdan baÅŸka bir ÅŸey deÄŸildi.

The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a human-sized anger!

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.

Man is...a thinking erratum, that's what he is. Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.

People tend to consider beig vulnerable a bad thing. It's not. Vulnerability reminds us that we're human. It keeps us open to giving and receiving love. Without at least a little, we can become someone living n a prison of our own making, where the walls are so thick that no one can get in or out.

I could never leave,' Pine Sap said. 'Why?' she asked. Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. 'Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.

The living always think that monsters roar and gnash their teeth. But I've seen that real monsters can be friendly; they can smile, and they can say please and thank you like everyone else. Real monsters can appear to be kind. Sometimes they can be inside us.