Motivational Quotes

Humankind

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man--yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

- Antonius, Marcus

Best Quotes about Humankind

I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Freud, Sigmund

Consider your breed; you were not made to live like beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Dante Alighieri

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

Beecher, Henry Ward

Everyone is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.

Cervantes, Miguel De

Always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

Aurelius, Marcus

In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

Marshall, Thurgood

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

Miller, Henry

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.

Smith, Adam

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Freud, Sigmund

11.

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.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

Antonius, Marcus

13.

If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.

Pope, Alexander

14.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

15.

Be tolerant of the human race. Your whole family belongs to it -- and some of your spouse's family does too.

16.

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Lewis, C. S.

17.

The age of chivalry has gone; the age of humanity has come.

Sumner, Charles

18.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, What's it for?

Robert, Fulghum

19.

Mankind are animals that makes bargains, no other animal does this.

Smith, Adam

20.

We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.

Adenauer, Konrad

21.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

22.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

Pegler, Westbrook

23.

Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!

Reichmann, W.J.

24.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

25.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

Butler, Samuel

26.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Doren, Carl Van

27.

But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.

Kipling, Rudyard

28.

Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. [Genesis 3:5]

Bible

29.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Hugo, Victor

30.

The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous.

Leonard, George

31.

If you think that every bad thing that has been done on the face of the earth has been done by man, you're right -- but so has every good thing.

32.

As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.

Boulding, Kenneth Ewart

33.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Heinlein, Robert

34.

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

Sarraute, Nathalie

35.

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

37.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Daumal, Rene

38.

There are two kinds of people in the world -- those you love, and those you don't understand.

39.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men -- each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature -- are shot down wholesale.

Hesse, Hermann

40.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

42.

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

Man must realize his own unimportance before he can appreciate his importance.

Baumgardy, R. M.

44.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

Froude, James A.

45.

A human being is a single being. Unique and unrepeatable.

Caddy, Eileen

46.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

Thurber, James

47.

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

Lincoln, Abraham

48.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

Twain, Mark

49.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.