Quotes about humanity
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“Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in certain ways– conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment. That is not who they are, but that is who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they are. To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a prison not only for the other person but also for yourself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 8

Way, Thinking, Appearance, Childhood

“Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are. Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home: I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 4

Life, Truth, Home, Sense

“The human condition: Lost in thought Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past. In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness. In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Chapter 2 Beyond the Thinking Mind

Life, People, Nature, Sense

“Just as the ancient sutras, the writings contained within this book are sacred and have come out of a state of consciousness we may call stillness. Unlike those ancient sutras, however, they don’t belong to any one religion or spiritual tradition, but are immediately accessible to the whole of humanity. There is also an added sense of urgency here. The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), intro

Books, Religion, Sense

“The greatest and noblest conceptions have no image wrought plainly for human vision, which he who wishes to satisfy the mind of the inquirer can apply to some one of his senses and by mere exhibition satisfy the mind. We must therefore endeavor by practice to acquire the power of giving and understanding a rational definition of each one of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, can be exhibited by reason only, and it is for their sake that all we are saying is said. But it is always easier to practice in small matters than in greater ones.”

Plato book Statesman

285e-286b
Statesman

Understanding, Sense

“We embrace this dream altogether, regardless of our class, our region, and our religious community. All these are secondary to me compared to human dignity, compared to the respect for the human being and the individual, compared to the right of the Lebanese to enjoy security, safety, and equality without any discrimination whatsoever, this is what matters to me. We must build the state of today for the year 2000, we do not want to go backward, restore and build on the remnants of the state of 1943.”

Bachir Gemayel (1947–1982) Lebanese politician and militia commander

Source: History of the Kataeb Party

Dreams, Communication

“A person, being in the orbit of developed humanism can become an unchangeable creator of higher values.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Personality

“The complexity of the world is not revealed by its simplification in human mind.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

World

“True faith is faith in the immortality of Human.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Faith

“I have learned that…
you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.
No matter how much I care, some people just don't care back.
It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.
It's not what you have in your life, but who you have in your life that counts.
You can do something in an instant that will give you a heartache for life.
No matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides.
You should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.
We are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.
There are people who love you dearly, but just don't know how to show it.
True friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. The same goes for true love.
Just because someone doesnt love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.
Maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated.
No matter how good a friend someone is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.
No matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop for your grief.
Just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.
We don't have to change friends if we understand that friends change.
You shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.
There are so many ways of falling and staying in love.
No matter how many friends you have, if you are their pillar, you will feel lonely and lost at the times you need them most.
The people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon.
Although the word "love" can have many different meanings, it loses value when overly used.
Love is not for me to keep, but to pass on to the next person I see.
There are people who love you dearly but just don't know how to show it.
Every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch-holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.
I still have a lot to learn……”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Love, Life, Friendship, People

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Evil

“Since human knowledge is not perfect, a more knowledgeable person is not always right.”

Raheel Farooq Pakistani writer

Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew (2020)

Knowledge, Personality, Perfection

“God seems to have disappeared from the horizon, and his word no longer seems a compass guiding our lives, our basic decisions, our human and social relationships.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2020s, 2022

God, Decision

“Many US journalists and politicians acknowledge that climate change is the largest threat facing humanity, but few point to the fact that the US military is the largest institutional polluter, and emitter of carbon emissions, and every single climate treaty excludes their responsibility.”

Abby Martin (1984) American journalist

Interview https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/20/what-are-the-prospects-for-peace-an-interview-with-abby-martin/ with Counterpunch (2021)

Change

“Technology does not lead us to stars, human love does.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Love, Star

“It is a human duty to measure his happiness by the happiness of others.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Happiness

“The only way is not humans to come to find the truth. Because if so, then they will get lost. How can humans find what they don't know? Therefore, humans are only possible to let the truth come knocking on the door so that they get enlightenment. They become blessed. Not by his own will, but because of the desire of the truth itself.”

Titon Rahmawan

#Truth

Truth, Way

“Just like water and air, connection with others is a basic human need.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Water

“To understand the importance of not touching a person who does not want us, to realise that it is not right to deceive someone who does not belong to us, but only out of selfishness, for the pleasure of it or for pure satisfaction is not for everyone. And above all, it means loving and respecting human worth.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Capire l'importanza di non toccare una persona che non ci voglia, rendersi conto che non sia giusto illudere qualcuno che non ci appartenga, ma solo per egoismo, per il piacere di farlo o per pura soddisfazione non è da tutti. E soprattutto, significa amare e rispettare il valore umano.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Pleasure, Understanding, Personality

“It's fascinating the intellect of a person who always has a resource, who instead of getting down about a problem look for a solution. The mind remains the most interesting and engaging place of a human being.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: È affascinante l'intelletto di una persona che ha sempre una risorsa, che invece di abbattersi per un problema cerca una soluzione. La mente rimane il posto più interessante e coinvolgente di un essere umano.
Source: prevale.net

Problem, Personality

This quote waiting for review.

“Fiction is far more accurate than History when it comes to the human being.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: https://www.mundoclasico.com/articulo/45227/entrevista-intrapersonal-confrontada-omar-jerez-con-jose-baroja

History

“There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

Source: Count Zero (1986), Ch. 2, Marly's sensory link conversation interview with Herr Virek.

“Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.”

Jon Krakauer book Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

Source: Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

“Religion, the dominion of the human mind;
Property, the dominion of human needs; and
Government, the dominion of human conduct,
represent the stronghold of man's enslavement
and all the horrors it entails.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Religion

“You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Knowledge, Personality

“A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”

Marilynne Robinson (1943) American novelist and essayist

Source: When I Was a Child I Read Books

Love, God, World, Imagination

“The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.”

Heywood Broun (1888–1939) American sportswriter

Love, Making love

“We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicionwork with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Source: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

“To reconcile the gentleman with himself, it must be imagined that he determined the human character by the points of the compass. The truth was, that all men having power ought to be distrusted, to a certain degree.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Madison's notes (11 July 1787) http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_711.asp<br>Variants: <br class="br">1780s, The Debates in the Federal Convention (1787) <br class="br">Context: Two objections had been raised against leaving the adjustment of the representation, from time to time, to the discretion of the Legislature. The first was, they would be unwilling to revise it at all. The second, that, by referring to wealth, they would be bound by a rule which, if willing, they would be unable to execute. The first objection distrusts their fidelity. But if their duty, their honor, and their oaths, will not bind them, let us not put into their hands our liberty, and all our other great interests; let us have no government at all. In the second place, if these ties will bind them we need not distrust the practicability of the rule. It was followed in part by the Committee in the apportionment of Representatives yesterday reported to the House. The best course that could be taken would be to leave the interests of the people to the representatives of the people.<br>Mr. Madison was not a little surprised to hear this implicit confidence urged by a member who, on all occasions, had inculcated so strongly the political depravity of men, and the necessity of checking one vice and interest by opposing to them another vice and interest. If the representatives of the people would be bound by the ties he had mentioned, what need was there of a Senate? What of a revisionary power? But his reasoning was not only inconsistent with his former reasoning, but with itself. At the same time that he recommended this implicit confidence to the Southern States in the Northern majority, he was still more zealous in exhorting all to a jealousy of a western majority. To reconcile the gentleman with himself, it must be imagined that he determined the human character by the points of the compass. The truth was, that all men having power ought to be distrusted, to a certain degree. The case of Pennsylvania had been mentioned, where it was admitted that those who were possessed of the power in the original settlement never admitted the new settlements to a due share of it. England was a still more striking example.

Men, Truth, Imagination

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Heart

“Life is full of screwups," he said, chucking another paper at the split-level before taking the corner. "You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existence.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Life, Parting

“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

Women, War, Truth, Idea

“The future is an inﬁnite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in deﬁance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.
Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Context: To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacriﬁce, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magniﬁcently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an inﬁnite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in deﬁance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Thinking, Success, Future, Victory

“But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sister

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Variant: It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.
Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!”

Mikhail Bulgakov book Heart of a Dog

Source: Heart of a Dog

Dogs, Heart

“The problems we face, did not come down from the heavens. They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Problem, Decision, Change

“You have qualities which I had not before supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

Angels

“Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

The Dilbert Principle (1995)

Religion

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Time, Past, Future

“That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Animals

“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Love, Truth, Beauty, Knowledge

“Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”

Robin McKinley Chalice

Source: Chalice

Laughter

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption … is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 7, sct. 168.

“Best way to save humanity is to turn the monsters against one another.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnDivided

Way

“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

People, Age

“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden (1854)

Animals, Parting

“How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Love, Heart

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

Nick Hornby book How to Be Good

Variant: The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Source: How to Be Good

Love

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Source: Eat, pray, love: one woman's search for everything

Life, Way, Change

“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

This appears as an anonymous proverb in Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine Vol. XIII, (January - June 1883) edited by T. De Witt Talmage, and apparently only in recent years has it become attributed to Addison.
Disputed

Life, Smile, Flowers, Cute

“Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Animals

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

Life, Men, Loneliness

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

Helder Camara (1909–1999) Brazilian Catholic priest, archbishop of Olinda and Recife

Source: Spiral Of Violence

Love, Men, World

“In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Letter to A. Bronson (30 July 1838); a similar idea was later more famously expressed by Abraham Lincoln, "With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right".

Men

“Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Walter Brueggemann (1933) American theologian

Nature, Hurt

“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

People, Angels

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood

Lie, Fear, Flowers, Tear

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.”

Octavio Paz book The Labyrinth of Solitude

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Variant: Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Context: Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Solitude

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

The Blood of Others [Le sang des autres] (1946)
General sources

Life, Freedom

“Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

Variant: No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids - human beings built them because they're clever and they work hard. And 'Star Trek' is about those things.

“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

Love