Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Dante Alighieri

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Rogers, Will

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

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

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.

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

Caddy, Eileen

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

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.

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

Johnson

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

10.

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

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Murdoch, Iris

13.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

14.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

15.

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

16.

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

17.

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

18.

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

19.

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.

20.

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Lessing, Doris

21.

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

22.

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

Socrates

23.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

24.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

Einstein, Albert

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

27.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

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

Sumner, Charles

29.

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

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

Dante Alighieri

31.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

32.

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

Hoffer, Eric

33.

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

Terence

34.

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

35.

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

Robert, Fulghum

36.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Smith, Adam

38.

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

39.

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much -- those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

Curtis, Cyrus H. K

40.

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

41.

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

Sumner, Charles

42.

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

43.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Twain, Mark

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Williams, Tennessee

48.

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

49.

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

50.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich