Humanity Quotes

Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

John Donne

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another

Sir Winston Churchill

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Their smiles and laughter are due to their habit of thinking pleasurably aloud about the pleasures of life. They have humanity rather than humour, and the real significance of the distinction is seldom understood.

Luigi Barzini, The Italians, 196

Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.

Victor Hugo

Man is a machine and in the whole universe there is but a single substance, matter, variously modified.

Julien de la Mettrie, The Human

The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.

Walt Whitman

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Immanuel Kant

Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

Jodi Picoult

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

Leo Tolstoy

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

C.S. Lewis

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

Leo Tolstoy

Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice.

Paul West

We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.

William Shakespeare

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much -- those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

Cyrus H. K Curtis

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

Orson Scott Card

There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it.

Henry David Thoreau

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

H. L. Mencken

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

H. L. Mencken

An effective human being is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ida P. Rolf