Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

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

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

Sumner, Charles

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.

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

Bacon, Francis

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

Socrates

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.

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

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

Kant, Immanuel

10.

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

France, Anatole

11.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

12.

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

13.

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

Dante Alighieri

14.

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

Caddy, Eileen

15.

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

Robert, Fulghum

16.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Watts, Alan W.

17.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

18.

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

Calvino, Italo

19.

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

Butler, Samuel

20.

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

Lippmann, Walter

21.

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

Sumner, Charles

22.

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

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

Doren, Carl Van

25.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

Sterling, John

26.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

27.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

28.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

29.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

30.

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.

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

Pegler, Westbrook

33.

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

Canetti, Elias

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

Murdoch, Iris

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Einstein, Albert

41.

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

42.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Adam

45.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Gide, Andre

50.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.