Quotes and text excerpts about "humanity"

“ Humanity is a peculiar class of life which, in some degree, determines its own destinies; therefore in practical life words and ideas become facts—facts, moreover, which bring about important practical consequences. ”

“ Humanity is the whole. Men alone are half a sphere; women alone half a sphere; men and women together the whole of truth, the whole of love, the whole of aspiration. We have come to recog- nize this thought in nearly all the walks of life. We want to ac- knowledge it in the unity of mankind. The central thought we need in our creeds and in our lives is that of the solidarity and brother- hood of the race. This movement derives its greatest significance not because it opens a place here and there for women; not because it enables women to help men ”

“ What humanity is suffering from is a restriction of affections, and an effusion of fears.
People are afraid of being frank and therefore cultivate the sulks, suffer and become ill from the repression. ”

“ The idea of humanity is the idea of the worth and consequently of the rights of each individual man. It is the idea of liberty; not of liberty interpreted by passion and selfishness as the inauguration of the license which violates right, but of liberty interpreted by reason and conscience as the limit which the action of each man encounters in the right of his neighbor. ”

“ Humanity is a living organism, of which races and peoples are the members. In every organism changes are continually going on. Some, quite prominent in the embryonic stage, disappear in the later development. There are organs, on the other hand, hardly noticeable in the earlier existence of the organism, which become important only when the organism reaches the end of its development.
To the latter class of members of organic humanity (which class is really the creative one) belongs the Jewish people. ”

“ The world of humanity consists of two parts: male and female. Each is... The world of humanity consists of two parts: male and female. Each is the complement of the other. Therefore, if one is defective, the other will necessarily be incomplete, and perfection cannot be attained. There is a right hand and a left hand in the human body, functionally equal in service and administration. ”

“ Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is—and which yet, for one day, is no longer! ”

“ Humanity, essentially and fundamentally one, exhibits most manifold variety. While the unity of the race secures its sympathy with all its members, in its variety there is secured its indefinite expansion and progress. ”

“ Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. ”

“ Humanity, by unmistakable signs, shows that it is on the wane, and that having employed its strength in maturity, age is now overtaking it. In time it will be content to live on the accumulated wisdom of the centuries, and, inured to thought, it will review the collective agitations of its past life, and recognize the vanity of the goal hitherto pursued.... Humanity, in its decline, will leave no heir to profit by its accumulated wealth. ”

“ The word humanity strikes us as strangely discordant, in the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no humanity here.
Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and the Lammles, and the Wilfers, and the Veneerings. It is in what men have in common with each other, and not what they have in distinction. The people just named have nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have nothing in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world if the world of Our Mutual Friend were an honest reflection of it! ”

“ Goodness and beauty for humanity is what unites men. Thus if the partizans of science and art actually have in view the good of humanity, they ought to advance only such sciences and such arts as lead to these ends; and if this were so, there would not be so many sciences, the aim of which is the advantage only of a few societies and the injury of others. If good were actually the aim of arts and sciences, never would the investigations of the positive sciences, since they often have no relation to the true advantage of mankind, attain such an inexplicable importance. ”

“ For it is humanity which is the great orphan, the only disinherited one upon this earth, my friend. And it is the duty of every man who is capable of an unselfish impulse to do something, however little, for its welfare. ”

“ The self-organisation of humanity is the struggle with our inner spontaneity, at a biological and social level. Just as humanity takes up tools to fight external nature, the tools of the organisation are no less necessary to humanity. Mankind produces them only with great difficulty and great sacrifices. ”

“ We are all intensely eager to know what are the possibilities of humanity. We seek knowledge of them as an heir questions searchingly concerning the extent of the inheritance which has fallen to him. Literature is the inventory of the heritage of humanity. Life is but a succession of emotions; and the earnest mind burns with desire to learn what emotions are within its possibilities. The discoverer of an unsuspected capability of receiving delight, the realization of an unknown sensation, even of pain, increases by so much the extent of the possessions of the human being to whom he imparts it. ”

“ Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.
This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. ”

“ It is an awful thing for a man to say. The man never lived, save he who perfected our humanity, who ever did the very best he could. You dishonor your life, you not simply shut your eyes to certain facts, you not simply say an infinitely absurd and foolish thing, but you dishonor your human life if you say that you have done in any day of your life or in all the days of your life put together, the very best that you could, or been the very best man that you could be. ”

“ I know a man who loves a beautiful woman. He was once engaged to marry her, but friends who are blind to the rights of humanity, no odds how poor or rich the individuals may be, interfered and separated the loving couple. They trampled on their young hearts and crushed them until they bled from the bruises, and made love appear as a criminal and outlaw.
They love each other still, though both are married to another. There is a pain in each heart that will never cease aching, but the wealthy friends who separated them are blind to the wrong they perpetrated against these disappointed souls. ”

“ Use is the world's great test of anything; unless it can be utilized by some one it is valueless to aid humanity; everything that comes forth into form from any state of consciousness must prove its own power to persist, or it vanishes and is forgotten.
Nothing too high, nothing too low, nothing too wide, nothing too narrow, too shallow, but all perfectly adjusted--this is the measure of self, and when we know this the illumined life works out its own unfoldment, passing at will to any degree of consciousness. ”

“ The finest type of human development is strongly self-centered, but the self-limited individual is deficient in essential humanity, for man is a social being, not merely a gregarious animal. He does not merely hunt in packs like the wolves, nor herd together for protection like weaker animals; but before man was possible a species of social creatures had appeared, who, living together, sharing in weal and woe, and especially through close association in play, developed a community of feeling which taught them speech and thought and made them the ancestors of the civilizations. ”

“ There is no man in the world who believes more in human nature than I do. No man believes more in the nobility and splendor of humanity than I do; no man feels more grateful than I to the self-denying, heroic, splendid souls who have made this world fit for ladies and gentlemen to live in. But I believe that the human mind has reached its top in three departments. I don't believe the human race—no matter if it lives millions of years more upon this wheeling world—I don't believe the human race will ever produce in the world anything greater, sublimer, than the marbles of the Greeks. ”

“ Man is a social being. Unselfish society is the harmony of humanity: loving interchange is the music of life; the music which lifts the attuned soul above discordant passions and petty cares—and song is the voice in which that music breathes. ”

“ A man is an individual, not a mere unit in a mass; a personality, not a mere member of a body politic. Did you ever think what a fearful lack of that which is noble in humanity is contained in the world? It ignores that which is highest and best in human nature—man's freedom and power of self-organization and self-determining influence in the masses of men. We are too apt to fall in the same line or take on the same personalities of those around us for the emancipation from bondage of social errors, evils, spiritual freedom and individual aims. ”

“ Most people sympathize too much with themselves. They take themselves as a single sentence isolated from the great text of life. They study themselves too much as separated from the rest of humanity, instead of being vitally connected with their fellow-men. There are some people who surrender to sorrow as others give way to dissipation. There is a vain pride of sorrow as well as of beauty. Most individuals have a strange glow of vanity in looking back upon their past and feeling that few others in life have suffered such trials, hardships and disappointments as have come to them. ”

“ Ignorance is bred from a closed brain; intelligence from an open one. He who is incapable of thinking is like the blind who cannot see or the deaf who cannot hear. The thought is the mightiest force for good or evil, humanity has to contend with; time is measured by it and pure meditation makes the days short and sweet, while evil notions lengthen and depreciate them. The mind that retains good ideas and refuses bad ones is of incalculable value to mankind for it has an instantaneous effect upon other minds in all parts of the earth. ”

“ What climate, what soil, what regimen, what food, what heat, what moisture, what drought, what light, what combination of phosphorus, what disengagement of electricity, separated from the animal races, not only man, but human society? humanity with its combats, its falls, its risings again, its sorrows and its joys, its tears and its smiles; humanity with its arts, its sciences, its religion, its history in short, its history and its hopes of immortality? ”

“ We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians;
I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. ”

“ A man who commits a crime defeats the end of his existence. He was created for benefit, and he exists for harm; and as well-doing makes power and wisdom, ill-doing takes them away. A man who steals another man’s labor steals away his own faculties; his integrity, his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. ”

“ Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists. ”

“ Every woman has had, at some time in her life, an experience with man in the raw. In reality, one cannot set down with any degree of accuracy the age when his rawness attacks him, or the time when he has got the last remnant of it out of his system. But a close study of the complaint, and the necessity for pigeon-holing everything and everybody, lead one to declare that somewhere in the vicinity of the age of thirty-five man emerges from his rawness and becomes a part of trained humanity—a humanity composed of men and women trained in the art of living together. ”

“ In a word, we hold for a truth, that a thoroughly good tragedy is an impossibility in a state of manners and literature where the poet and philosopher have got the better of the man; where the reality does not mould the imagination, but the imagination glosses over the reality; and where the unexpected stroke of true calamity, the biting edge of true passion, is blunted, sheathed, and lost, amidst the flowers of poetry strewed over unreal, unfelt distress, and the flimsy topics of artificial humanity prepared beforehand for all occasions. ”

“ Slavery is inconsistent with the dearest and most essential rights of man’s nature; it is detrimental to virtue and industry; it hardens the heart to those tender sympathies which form the most lovely part of human character; it involves the innocent in hopeless misery, in order to procure wealth and pleasure for the authors of that misery; it seeks to degrade into brutes beings whom the Lord of Heaven and Earth endowed with rational souls, and created for immortality; in short, it is utterly repugnant to every principle of reason, religion, humanity, and conscience. ”

“ Fame is one of the natural rewards of virtue. Do not pursue her, and she will follow you.
Do not confine your charity to giving money. You may have many23 opportunities of showing a tender and compassionate spirit where your money is not wanted.—There is a false and unnatural refinement in sensibility, which makes some people shun the sight of every object in distress. Never indulge this, especially where your friends or acquaintances are concerned. Let the days of their misfortunes, when the world forgets or avoids them, be the season for you to exercise your humanity and friendship. ”

“ The spirit of art is not the spirit of trade: it is not a question between the grower or consumer of some perishable and personal commodity: but it is a question between human genius and human taste, how much the one can produce for the benefit of mankind, and how much the other can enjoy. It is ‘the link of peaceful commerce ‘twixt dividable shores.’ To take from it this character is to take from it its best privilege, its humanity. ”