Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Bible

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Calvino, Italo

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

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

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

12.

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

Machiavelli, Niccolo

13.

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

Smith, Adam

14.

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

Foucault, Michel

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Terence

18.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

Pegler, Westbrook

19.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

Quinet, Edgar

20.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Daumal, Rene

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

25.

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

26.

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

27.

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

29.

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

Kant, Immanuel

30.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

31.

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

32.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Socrates

33.

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

34.

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

35.

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

Einstein, Albert

36.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

37.

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

Rogers, Will

38.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

39.

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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

Rolf, Ida P.

41.

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

42.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

Proverb, Turkish

46.

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

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

Twain, Mark

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

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