Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Beecher, Henry Ward

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

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

Rolf, Ida P.

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

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

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

Dante Alighieri

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

France, Anatole

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Johnson

10.

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

Proverb, Turkish

11.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

12.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

Caulfield, Holden

13.

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

Butler, Samuel

14.

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

Smith, Adam

15.

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

Reagan, Ronald

16.

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

Kant, Immanuel

17.

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

Holmes, John Andrew

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

Sterling, John

20.

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

24.

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

25.

What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilization concerns man's behavior to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

Mayhew, Dr Edward

26.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Mead, Margaret

28.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Williams, Tennessee

33.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

34.

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

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

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

37.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

38.

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

39.

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

Doren, Carl Van

40.

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

Caddy, Eileen

41.

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

Terence

42.

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

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

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

45.

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

Murdoch, Iris

46.

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

Robert, Fulghum

47.

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

48.

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

Calvino, Italo

49.

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.

50.

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