Quotes About Humanity

I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn't such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities

So long as there is a single god standing, man's task is not done.

But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to "understand.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

Nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others.

knows it is necessary, knows that we cannot do without anxiety once we have known it.

El hombre ha hecho de la actividad un principio de destrucción más que de creación. Ha convertido la laboriosidad en desgracia, el trabajo en mal y la prisa en maldición. El hombre es una hormiga bestial.

If we did not bear the stigmata of life, how easy it would be to steal away, and how well everything would go by itself!

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

what luck, what a windfall! I am still alive, I am still one of those flesh-and-blood ghosts. . . .

Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

Man is not content to be man. But he doesn't know what to revert to, nor how to recover a state of which he has no clear memory. His nostalgia for it is the basis of his being, and it is by such nostalgia he communicates with all that remains of what is oldest in himself.

I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more.

Man interests me only since he has ceased to believe in himself. Wile he was in his ascending phase, he deserved no more than indifference. Now he provokes a new sentiment, a special sympathy: compassionate horror.

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

We can act only against the truth. Man starts over again every day, in spite of everything he knows, against everything he knows.

Les ravages de la "civilisation" sont si évidents qu'on a honte de les signaler encore.

To suffer is the supreme modality of taking the world seriously.

Man attracts and appalls me, I love and hate him with a vehemence which condemns me to passivity.

La desproporción entre la infinitud del mundo y la finitud del hombre es un serio motivo de desesperación;

De dou? mii de ani, Isus se r?zbun? pe noi pentru c? nu a murit pe o canapea.

At grips, however, with the quasi-totality of humanity, they know that antisemitism does not represent a phenomenon of one period or another, but a constant, and that yesterday's exterminators used the same terms as Tacitus . . .