Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Baumgardy, R. M.

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Cruelty has a Human Heart, And jealousy a Human Face; Terror the Human Form Divine, And secrecy the Human Dress. The Human Dress is forged Iron, The Human Form a Fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal d, The Human Heart its hungry gorge.

Blake, William

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

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

Sterling, John

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Terence

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

Smith, Adam

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

15.

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

16.

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

Sumner, Charles

17.

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

18.

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

France, Anatole

19.

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

Johnson

20.

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

Einstein, Albert

21.

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

Miller, Henry

22.

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

Caddy, Eileen

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Winston

25.

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

Calvino, Italo

26.

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

27.

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

Butler, Samuel

28.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

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.

30.

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

Baumgardy, R. M.

31.

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

Proverb, Turkish

32.

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

Sarraute, Nathalie

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Dante Alighieri

36.

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

37.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

38.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Barry, Dave

40.

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

41.

Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. [Genesis 3:5]

Bible

42.

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

Smith, Adam

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Hoffer, Eric

49.

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

50.

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

Sumner, Charles