Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Humankind

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

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Landor, Walter Savage

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

Sarraute, Nathalie

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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.

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.

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

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

Kant, Immanuel

10.

Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

Hamilton, Edith

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

13.

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

14.

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

Steinbeck, John

15.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

16.

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

17.

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

Smith, Adam

18.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

19.

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

20.

If you think that every bad thing that has been done on the face of the earth has been done by man, you're right -- but so has every good thing.

21.

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

Gide, Andre

22.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

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

Hoffer, Eric

29.

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

France, Anatole

30.

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

Robert, Fulghum

31.

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

32.

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

Bacon, Francis

33.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Mead, Margaret

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Socrates

40.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

Pegler, Westbrook

41.

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

42.

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

Canetti, Elias

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Barry, Dave

46.

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

Calvino, Italo

47.

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

48.

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

Dante Alighieri

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De