Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Sumner, Charles

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

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

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

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

Doren, Carl Van

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Bible

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

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.

10.

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

Churchill, Winston

11.

Let us ask ourselves; What kind of people do we think we are?

Reagan, Ronald

12.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

17.

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

Sumner, Charles

18.

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

France, Anatole

19.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Janeway, Elizabeth

20.

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

21.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

22.

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

Johnson

23.

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

24.

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

Calvino, Italo

25.

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

26.

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.

Baudrillard, Jean

27.

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

Smith, Adam

28.

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

29.

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

Caddy, Eileen

30.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

34.

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

Reik, Theodor

35.

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

Terence

36.

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

Canetti, Elias

37.

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

38.

Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.

Einstein, Albert

39.

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

40.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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.

42.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Marshall, Thurgood

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

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

48.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

49.

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

50.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

Quinet, Edgar