Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Caddy, Eileen

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Smith, Adam

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Einstein, Albert

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

10.

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

11.

Donne, John

12.

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

13.

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

14.

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

Twain, Mark

15.

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

Williams, Tennessee

16.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

17.

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

Gide, Andre

18.

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

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

21.

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

Churchill, Winston

22.

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

Sumner, Charles

23.

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

Johnson

24.

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

Holmes, John Andrew

25.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

32.

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

33.

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

Hoffer, Eric

34.

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

Murdoch, Iris

35.

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

36.

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

Reagan, Ronald

37.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Fuller, Buckminster

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

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

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.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

43.

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

44.

Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Twain, Mark

45.

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

Sarraute, Nathalie

46.

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

Canetti, Elias

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward