quotations about humanity
Humanity is not like a bundle of sticks, a cluster of hardly outlined microcosms, nor an arithmetical addition of integers, but is a body constituted, after the fashion of the human body, of adapted members, living, throbbing and moving as one.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
STEPHEN HAWKING
Der Spiegel, Oct. 17, 1988
To know human nature is the climax of all knowledge.
O. S. FOWLER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Those whose humanity is large, while their exhibition of righteousness is slight, are loved and not honoured. Those whose righteousness is large and their humanity slight are honoured and not loved.
CONFUCIUS
Delphi Collected Works of Confucius
Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
letter, Aug. 13, 1766
There is nothing on earth divine beside humanity.
MELANCTHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
ERIC HOFFER
The Passionate State Of Mind and Other Aphorisms
Humanity is a vast circle of beings on a plain, in the midst of which stands the shrine of goodness and happiness, inviting all to approach; now the attached pairs in this circle should not be continually looking on each other, but should turn their faces very often toward this central object, and as they advance they will, like radii from the circumference to the center, continually become closer to each other as they approximate their mutual and ultimate object.
J. FOSTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Nothing can be truly just which is inconsistent with humanity.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
When justice has spoken, humanity must have its turn.
PIERRE VERGNIAUD
speech, Jan. 17, 1793
I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
"Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey"
There is not a single word spoken, not a single work performed, nay, not even a single thought entertained, nor passion indulged, but it leaves itself indelibly written on the individual man, on humanity as a whole, and oft on physical nature herself, through all succeeding time.
ROBERT BROWN
A Lecture on the Social Unity of Humanity
Human nature is hard to overcome.
PERIANDER
attributed, Day's Collacon
In baptism one returns to the state of creation ... when all humanity was unified.
L. MICHAEL WHITE
From Jesus to Christianity
I tend to regard the whole human race as just a lot of different subspecies of pest.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
The darkness of humanity's past threatens to eclipse the brightness of its future.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man's lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand.
MAX HORKHEIMER
"The latest attack on metaphysics", Critical Theory: Selected Essays
Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day,
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
We are all water from
different rivers
That's why it's so easy to to meet
We are all water in this vast,
vast ocean
Someday we'll evaporate
together.
JOHN LENNON
We Are All Water
When superiors are fond of showing their humanity, inferiors try to outstrip one another in their practice of it.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius