Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

Proverb, Turkish

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

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

Rolf, Ida P.

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

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

Socrates

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Machiavelli, Niccolo

10.

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

Smith, Adam

11.

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.

Ruskin, John

12.

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

13.

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

Hoffer, Eric

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

20.

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

21.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

30.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Butler, Samuel

34.

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

Mead, Margaret

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

40.

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

41.

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

France, Anatole

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Man is a useless passion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

46.

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

Smith, Adam

47.

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

48.

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

Kant, Immanuel

49.

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

Terence

50.

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

Adenauer, Konrad