Quotes About Humanity

When I ask people to tell me how Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine, they often describe a kind of laminating process, in which his humanity was encased in divine plastic.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

If someone walks by or speaks to you, you may find that your power of attentiveness extends to this person as well. Even if you do not know him, you may be able to see his soul too, the one he thinks he has so carefully covered up. There is something he is working on in his life, the same way you are working on something. Can you see it in his face? You are related, even if you do not know each other's names.

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.

Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one's bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.

Because some people dressed more expensively and lived in a higher stratum of society, it did not make them less human. They were born and they died. They sought for happiness in the same way as the humblest scullery-maid or the lowest paid stable-boy wanted to be happy in their lives.

In order to experience everyday spirituality, we need to remember that we are spiritual beings spending some time in a human body.

Yes, they manage to sound very reasonable to themselves as they talk of deterring others from crime; but the act of putting a man in jail remains essentially the act of trying to wish that man out of existence. From the moment of arrest one begins to feel against one's flesh the operation of this crude attempt at sorcery.

Inside each book a warm-blooded human being is reaching out to us, and whether we are being entertained or enlightened we are never alone while reading.

Yes, everything begins in the human heart. But the human heart is not vacuum-packed. The pulsebeat from any breast, however armored, is felt, not just in private contract-"doomed commitments"- between private persons, but in Selma, in Haight-Ashbury, in Vietnam, in South Africa, in East New York. Reports from those locations are also reports from the heart.

Lo scrittore è obbligato a guardare sotto ogni pietra. Può e dovrebbe rifiutare alcuni comportamenti o scelte nella sua vita personale. Ma non può fare a meno di contemplare l'intero spettro della condizione umana.

The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

Old Hamlet asks, "What is this quintessence of dust?" Dust it's a dry word, with Saharas of space between each letter.

Our power lies in the depth of our compassion and in our abilities to imagine each other in ourselves.

Children who find a single important life in the ordinary, unimportant, and unheroic are less likely to succumb to the human fallacy of Us versus Them [Betty Levin, "Polars Bears and Lemmings"].

I mull that over. Amber treats everyone out here like normal people, not homeless street losers, and in return they give her their names.

Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

Raw humanity offends our sensibilities.