Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Baumgardy, R. M.

Best Quotes about Humankind

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

Bacon, Francis

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

Caddy, Eileen

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

Man, became man through work, who stepped out of the animal kingdom as transformer of the natural into the artificial, who became therefore the magician, man the creator of social reality, will always stay the great magician, will always be Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die.

Fischer, Ernst

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

Dante Alighieri

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

Cruelty has a Human Heart, And jealousy a Human Face; Terror the Human Form Divine, And secrecy the Human Dress. The Human Dress is forged Iron, The Human Form a Fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal d, The Human Heart its hungry gorge.

Blake, William

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.

Proverb, Turkish

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.

10.

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

11.

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

Casals, Pablo

12.

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

Barry, Dave

13.

The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man.

Sumner, Charles

14.

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

15.

I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.

Terence

16.

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

Smith, Adam

17.

Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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.

Donne, John

20.

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

21.

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

22.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Steinbeck, John

23.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

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.

25.

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.

26.

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

Bible

27.

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

28.

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

29.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

30.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

Canetti, Elias

31.

We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will have to be that, as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.

Morris, Desmond

32.

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

Doren, Carl Van

33.

What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilization concerns man's behavior to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

Mayhew, Dr Edward

34.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

35.

People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire,why wasn't it done the other way?

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

36.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

37.

Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

King Jr. Martin Luther

38.

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

39.

Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

Hamilton, Edith

40.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

France, Anatole

41.

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

Kant, Immanuel

42.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

43.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

44.

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

Smith, Adam

45.

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

46.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

Weil, Simone

47.

Man is stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Williams, Tennessee

49.

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

50.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Calvino, Italo