Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Lessing, Doris

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Sumner, Charles

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

Rogers, Will

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Einstein, Albert

Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

King Jr. Martin Luther

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

Hoffer, Eric

10.

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

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.

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.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Kennedy, John F.

17.

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

18.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

19.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

20.

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

21.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

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

23.

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

Reagan, Ronald

24.

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

25.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

26.

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

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.

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

29.

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

30.

After all there is but one race -- humanity.

Moore, George

31.

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.

32.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

Weil, Simone

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

38.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

39.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Foucault, Michel

40.

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

Caddy, Eileen

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Sumner, Charles

47.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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