Motivational Quotes

Humankind

To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.

- Crowley, Aleister

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

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

Terence

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Robert, Fulghum

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

Butler, Samuel

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Caddy, Eileen

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

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

France, Anatole

10.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves.

Gandhi, Mahatma

11.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

12.

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.

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

People can be divided into three classes, the few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no idea what has happened.

15.

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

16.

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

17.

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.

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.

Johnson

24.

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.

Ruskin, John

25.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

33.

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

Calvino, Italo

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

36.

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

37.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

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

39.

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

Sumner, Charles

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.

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

42.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

43.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Socrates

44.

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

45.

Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

Hoffer, Eric

46.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

47.

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

Holmes, John Andrew

48.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

50.

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