Quotes about humanity
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A Poet's Advice (1958)
Context: Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel …
the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Source: Thief of Time
Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 15 : Bloodmoss
Context: "You fought for the knife?"
"Yes, but — "
"Then you're a warrior. That's what you are. Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature."
Will knew that the man was speaking the truth. But it wasn't a welcome truth. It was heavy and painful. The man seemed to know that, because he let Will bow his head before he spoke again.
"There are two great powers," the man said, "and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
"And now those two powers are lining up for battle. And each of them wants that knife of yours more than anything else. You have to choose, boy. We've been guided here, both of us — you with the knife, and me to tell you about it."
Nobel acceptance speech (1986)
Variant: Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.
“The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.”
Variant: The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
“The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves”
Source: The Grand Design
“Divine love always has met and always will meet every human need.”
“Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.”
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 3: A Free Man's Worship
Context: Such... but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
Context: That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
“How frail the human heart must be —
a mirrored pool of thought.”
Source: "I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt," quoted in the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975) as Plath's first poem, written at age 14
Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
“Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”
Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 249
As quoted in "On The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" by Hillary Rodham Clinton in Issues of Democracy Vol. 3, No. 3 (October 1998), p. 11
Source: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
“do not view mountains from the scale of human thought”
(1993), Epilogue, p. 155
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Source: Men in Dark Times
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 2
“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”
Variant: We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Attributed in The Quotable Woman (1991) by the Running Press, p. 53
1990s
Source: Speak, Memory
Source: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.”
Source: Ready Player One
“It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.”
Source: The Critic as Artist
“It's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”
Source: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
“… humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.”
Variant: humanity is a cancer on the body of the world
Source: Pretties
“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Source: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals/On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns
Source: Lettres à Génica Athanasiou
“Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection”
Source: What I Believe
Source: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace
Source: To the Lighthouse
“And what would humans be without love?"
RARE, said Death.”
Source: Sourcery
“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but rather by what one owns.”
Presidency (1977–1981), The Crisis of Confidence (1979)
Context: In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
Context: In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 99
Source: Politics
Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5
Source: 1930s, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 31