Quotes About Humanity

Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes! [N.B. this is obviously a humorous paraphrase]

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.

In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled. I bring you the Superman! He is that sea; in him your great contempt can be submerged.

Almost everything we call higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering

Man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting.

the lie is a condition of life.

You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath.

A man recovers best from his exceptional nature - his intellectuality - by giving his animal instincts a chance.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

The worst mutilation of man that can be imagined presented as the good man.

But grant me from time to time—if there are divine goddesses in the realm beyond good and evil—grant me the sight, but one glance of something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man , of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!

Do I advise you to love thy neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from thy neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for thy neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

Whoever extolls him as a God of love, does not think highly enough of love itself.