Quotes About Humanity

All Quiet on the Western Front

Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves; when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves; when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves; when we kill another, we kill ourselves.

Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, "Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad.

A reader wants, above all, to feel a range of emotions--excitement, love, hate, misery, and everything in between them; wants to breathe characters' air & see the world through their eyes.

Love is the commitment to treat a person with dignity and kindness regardless of how you feel about him or her.

3 What is Christianity – the central truths? If every religion has a major gift which I believe they do, then what is Christianity's gift to the world? I believe it is the Christ image of a god being plunged into raw, messy, sinful, human, broken life. He is a powerful symbol of a divine connectedness to all things, even the shit.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

Our lives and our deaths surely count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote, dismantle democracy, and assign seven billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to seven billion.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

Like me, they were alive at the moment—today's samples from the current batch of Cro-Magnon man. There were almost five billion of us specimens alive that morning in 1982. We who were awake were a multitude trampling the continents for our day in the light—feeling our lives and stirring about, building a better world a jot, or not—and soon the continents would roll us under, and new sets of people would trample us.

Most humans who were ever alive lived inside a single culture that had not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers' eyes—you can watch them read yours—and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet—common language or not, sale or no sale—and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move?