Quotes About Humanity

But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that. MOYERS: So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the generations, isn't functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one?

think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.

When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

the "guiding idea" of his work was to find "the commonality of themes in world myths, pointing to a constant requirement in the human psyche for a centering in terms of deep principles.

it is not science that has diminished human beings or divorced us from divinity. On the contrary, the new discoveries of science "rejoin us to the ancients" by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe "a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature;

it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor.

The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it.

There is a sense of respect for the other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly Greek. This is characteristic of these epics and tragedies. Aeschylus wrote his tragedy The Persians only a few years after he himself had been in battle against the Persians, and the humanity with which he treats his former enemy is something typically Greek.

Tehát amikor Jézus azt mondja, hogy szeresd felebarátodat, mint tenmagadat, akkor valójában nem kevesebbet állít, minthogy szeresd felebarátodat, mert Å' te magad vagy.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others

The belief in a super natural sources of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.

the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty—all equal before sleep, death's brother.

Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place.

To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint.

the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty—all equal before sleep, death's brother.

Ossip, I think you are a humbug...you are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet....

We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion

They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.

It's a long time since God has done anything for the people.

The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.

La natura umana, temo, non è bellissima da cima a fondo.