Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Calvino, Italo

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Lincoln, Abraham

It's great to be great, but it's greater to be human.

Rogers, Will

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

Temple, Sir William

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Churchill, Winston

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

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

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

After all there is but one race -- humanity.

Moore, George

10.

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.

11.

[Three classes of people]: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

18.

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

19.

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

Marshall, Thurgood

20.

The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but by what takes place in our hearts.

Kent, Sir Arthur

21.

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

22.

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Raleigh, Sir Walter

23.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich

24.

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

25.

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

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

Dante Alighieri

27.

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

29.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

Gide, Andre

32.

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

Kant, Immanuel

33.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

Caulfield, Holden

35.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

40.

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

Smith, Adam

41.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Einstein, Albert

42.

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

Proverb, Turkish

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Bacon, Francis

46.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Machiavelli, Niccolo

48.

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

Barry, Dave

49.

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.

50.

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