Quotes About Humanity

One of the marvels of human psychology is that the people who are thoroughly pessimistic about humankind want to solve our problems by trusting their solution to a very small number of small minds.

I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.

One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.

But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity.

destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody.

I am concerned with gloomier matters: the condition of being flesh, susceptible to pain, infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death. My life stains the air around me. I am a tea bag left too long in the cup, and my steepings grow darker and bitterer.

That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

Human qualities and emotions like love, charity, compassion, tolerance, patience, friendship, desire, hatred, ill-will, ignorance, conceit, etc., need no sectarian labels; they belong to no particular religion.

The terms 'justice' is ambiguous and dangerous, and in its name more harm than good is done to humanity.

We have met the enemy and they are us!

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.Unscrew the locks from the doors!Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.