Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Robert, Fulghum

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Bacon, Francis

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

Smith, Adam

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Twain, Mark

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

Barry, Dave

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

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.

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

10.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

11.

Everyone is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.

Cervantes, Miguel De

12.

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

Terence

13.

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

Gide, Andre

14.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich

15.

After all there is but one race -- humanity.

Moore, George

16.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

17.

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

18.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

Twain, Mark

19.

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

Sarraute, Nathalie

20.

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

France, Anatole

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Murdoch, Iris

24.

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.

25.

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

Sumner, Charles

26.

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

27.

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

28.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

Casals, Pablo

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

37.

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

Caddy, Eileen

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

There are two kinds of people in the world -- those you love, and those you don't understand.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Foucault, Michel

45.

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.

46.

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.

Proverb, Turkish

47.

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

Canetti, Elias

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

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

Churchill, Winston