c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Hm-m," he said. "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone. Guess whoI been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn't even think I was listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Prove it. I'll measure your words against your actions, and from that I will determine your worth.
— Jackie Kessler, Rage
Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.
— Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.
— Dean Koontz, Winter Moon
Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention.
— Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
Most people would have probably lost count around seven. This was, Harry knewfrom his extensive reading on logic and arithmetic, the largest number that most peoplecould visually appreciate. Put seven dots on a page, and most people can take a quickglance and declare, “Seven.” Switch to eight, and the majority of humanity was lost.
— Julia Quinn, What Happens in London
They are so frail humans. So easily crumpled and broken, like flower petals under foot.
— Jennifer Melzer, The Goblin Market
Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader
We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
— William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature.
— Tiffany Madison
That's my name. Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. And it's not Cassie for Cassiopeia. Not anymore. I am more than her now.I am all of them, Evan and Ben and Marika and Megan and Sam. I am Dumbo and Poundcake and Teacup. I am all the ones you emptied, the ones you corrupted, the ones you discarded, the thousands you thought you killed, but who live in me.But I am more than this. I am all those they remember, the ones they loved, everyone they knew, and everyone they only heard about. How many are contained in me? Count the stars. Go on, number the grains of sand. That's me.I am humanity.
— Rick Yancey, The Last Star
While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others—but none in themselves nobler than others.
— Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe: Part One, 1858
The weather is nature's disruptor of human plans and busybodies. Of all the things on earth, nature's disruption is what we know we can depend on, as it is essentially uncontrolled by men.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
— Charles W. Chesnutt
Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven. 
— Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings
I laughed when I read about being born with two hearts, one of which is devoted only to destroying humanity.
— Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries
It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable,and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. Theywill not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learnto ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
— Charles Morgan
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.
— Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
Extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
— Thomas More
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help... When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.
— Abraham Lincoln
In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.
— Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology
We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.
— Leo Tolstoy
Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?
— Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.
— Martin Cruz Smith
Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it.
— Tiffany Madison, Black and White
Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
— Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.
— Dawn Powell
Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
— Wendell Berry
Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, "I have done with men.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
But how nice it would be to know that some good Yankee woman - And there must be SOME good Yankee women. I don’t care what people say, they can’t all be bad! How nice it would be to know that they pulled weeds off our men’s graves and brought flowers to them, even if they were enemies. If Charlie were dead in the North it would comfort me to know that someone - And I don’t care what you ladies think of me,” her voice broke again, “I will withdraw from both clubs and I’ll — I’ll pull up every weed off every Yankee’s grave I can find and I’ll plant flowers, too — and — I just dare anyone to stop me!
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Be near your brothers. Not just one, but both of them.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
You tell me that you sometimes view the dark side of your Diana, and there no doubt you discover many Spots which I rather wish were erased, than conceal'd from you. Do not judge by this, that your opinion is an indifferent thing to me, (were it so, I should look forward with a heavey Heart,) but it is far otherways, for I had rather stand fair there, and be thought well of by Lysander than by the greater part of the World besides. I would fain hope that those faults which you discover, proceed more, from a wrong Head, than a bad Heart. E'er long May I be connected with a Friend from whose Example I may form a more faultless conduct, and whose benevolent mind will lead him to pardon, what he cannot amend.
— Abigail Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
Hu-man, Hu-mility, Hu-manity, is a title of nobility of the Perfected One, one who has knowledge of its self, and living its essence
— AainaA-Ridtz
I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.
— Manu Herbstein, AMA
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
— Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.
— Terry Pratchett
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)
— Elie Wiesel, Night
The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
— Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, On the Gods and Other Essays
For every item that carries the darkness of humanity there's one that holds the light. And that light is worth believing in. Not just in others, but in yourself as well.
— C.M. Rayne, The Forbidden Land of Andara
Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.
— John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on Cassavetes
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthousiastic outbreak in a madhouse.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.
— Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge.
— Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
No other being is lesser human than the one who thinks of others as such.
— Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting
Everyone is born with a different mind and the same heart.
— Raheel Farooq
However, in this city (San Francisco) that prides itself in being so progressive, it feels like we need to go back and master something both simple as well as incredibly complex – each other. We can learn to embrace our differences without making them a joke or a spectacle.
— Crystal Sykes
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
— Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
— George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes.And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk - lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say O.K. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?
— Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty
To save a man and thereby to spare a father's agony and a mother's feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
We often forget our human connectedness. Throughout my life, I have felt the greatest beauty lies in this connection. It has been in the deepest connections with others that I have experienced the greatest degree of learning, healing and transformation. This connection is a powerful thing, with the ability to transform lives, and ultimately transform human experience.
— Kristi Bowman, Journey to One: A Woman's Story of Emotional Healing and Spiritual Awakening
You matter, Mama repeated. Not because of whose son you are. Because of who you are. You're as important as every other human being that ever was or ever will be. Everyone matters.
— Kimberley Brubaker Bradley
Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer.
— J. Don Cook, Shooting from the Hip: Photographs and Essays
There was almost a flicker of humanity in the man. The kind of human who pulled wings off flies as a kid, but still human.
— Kate Griffin, The Midnight Mayor
Brandon, until this very moment, the world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I've tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect, and you've thrown by own words right back in my face; you've given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for your ugly murder!Tonight you've made me ashamed of every concept I've ever had, of superior or inferior beings, but I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we're each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in. By what right do you dare say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there [he's referencing the dead body of "David," lying in a trunk in the middle of the room] was inferior and therefore could be killed?Did you think you were God Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave! I don't know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you've done—YOU'VE MURDERED! You've strangled the life of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could... and never will again!
— Arthur Laurents
Maybe it's animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting. At any rate, how nice to be well dressed and among friends and in a state where poems pop out by themselves.
— Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog
Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.
— Ellis Peters, Monk's Hood
To judge a man means nothing other than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, but if we didn’t act right, they would put us out. That’s how folks do.
— Eddie Whitlock, Evil Is Always Human
[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.
— Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom
If there is some corner of the world which has remained peaceful, but with a peace based on injustices the peace of a swamp with rotten matter fermenting in its depths - we may be sure that that peace is false. Violence attracts violence. Let us repeat fearlessly and ceaselessly: injustices bring revolt, either from the oppressed or from the young, determined to fight for a more just and more human world.
— Hélder Câmara
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth
—  to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.” To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or “damned ghost” – would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.
You have no sense of your true duty, which is to be a man and preserve humanity. You imitate wise men so badly and bandits so well. Your movies and radio programs are full of murder.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones, and hair.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
Men are fickle creatures, capable of kindness and compassion yet fascinated by the basest atrocities.
— Brian Rathbone, Call of the Herald
The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he's fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there's a dream.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Humanity is the cancer of nature.
— Dave Foreman
What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
— Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
There were spaceships again in that century, an dthe ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species that considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.
— Eric Bentley
In the heart's deepest place, where the burden of ego is dropped and the mystery of soul is penetrated, a man finds the consciousness there not different in any way from what all other men may find. The mutuality of the human race is thus revealed as existing only on a plane where its humanness is transcended. This is why all attempts to express it in political and economic terms, no less than the theosophic attempts to form a universal brotherhood, being premature, must be also artificial. This is why they failed.
— Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton
You obviously don't have my soul or you wouldn't be trying to make deals.
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader
Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us even when we ignore it, and those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.
— Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Still, I never heard him say that he hated or wanted to hurt or kill someone for all the horrific things that had been happening to him and his family.
— Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia
The most reliable topic for small talk is the goings-on of stars whether they’re rising or falling, and whether nor not a particular story is truth or fiction. This is way out of balance. It invades the privacy of men and women who didn’t give up being human when they became famous, and it negates the meaning inherent in our own lives. (300)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning.
— Yasuo Kuwahara, Kamikaze: A Japanese Pilot's Own Spectacular Story of the Famous Suicide Squadrons
There is a graceless human tendency to wish upon others the ills visited upon oneself. Instead of pointing successors towards short cuts, you relish seeing them clambering through identical hoops.
— Michela Wrong
A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
love is like a rain bow can be seen in many different colors
— Abby Taylor
This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Nothing opens up the mind and the heart like books do, and so they have the power to change the whole world. That's why the are burning books, Ava. To stop us thinking, and feeling, and imagining...
— Kate Forsyth, The Beast's Garden
I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios . . . We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.
— Charles Bukowski
The atmosphere was electrified by the orgasm with which the strong and secure are overcome when confronted with the visible frailty of someone worse off than themselves.
— Paul Leppin, Blaugast : A Novel of Decline
Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better.
— Kate Forsyth, The Beast's Garden
Every form is an image. Every image is a name. Every name is an attribute, every attribute a verb. Every verb forms the sentence to be read on Judgement Day, from the very Qur’aanulQariim that is found within the breastplate of all that is ‘created’ in the form of humankind. Every object be it animated or non-animated is an image!!
— AainaA-Ridtz
If you see only your coreligionists as your brothers, you aren’t only a good man but also you are very low in morality! Your brothers are the whole humanity!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There is no rain beyond the clouds
—  there is no humanity beyond the compassion!
The human species' foremost task and unshakable duty is survival.
— Carlos J. Cortes, Perfect Circle
Just as I was about to close my eyes I saw a faint line connecting the shadows, like string you take into a forest so you don’t lose your way. Everything in the room was joined by one line; the frame to the curtain, the coil to the crack, the belt to the shoe. I closed my eyes and in the vision behind the skin of my lids I saw the line stretch way out to sea, like cobweb blown by the wind, further and further; it crossed the Pacific until the Pacific became the Indian and it found Robby in his ship. It touched his shoulder and moved across the sleeve of his shirt and up to his eyes and across the top of his head and then the line went to all the other men on the ship; then all the way back to me. Everyone was joined.
— Sofie Laguna, The Eye of the Sheep
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our generation you shall find.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest
What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands?
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
It's easy to romanticize the people in our lives that mean something to us. We elevate them onto a higher plane that the rest of humanity. They appear glorious and pristine and full of wonders of the Universe all wrapped up into one person-sized box waiting to be unpacked. It's easy to forget, when they appear perfect in every way and in every facet of their lives with every action they take, in the end they are still human. And we duly forget being human comes with an inherent composition of flaws in our genetic and mental make-up.
— August Clearwing, Never Have I Ever
We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.
— Charles Eisenstein
We let them help because they needed it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we are usefel in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute."---Cullen
— John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
There is a self-destructive program running in the consciousness of humanity, and we must write a new program.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel full of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way.
— Karen Traviss, Matriarch
People who discriminate understand that they are a stranger to others.
— Jestoni Revealed
❤ We must all find the spirit to try and help better humanity! We all have it inside us to contribute something to the cause of humanity!
— Timothy Pina, Hearts for Haiti: Book of Poetry & Inspiration
Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.
— Marilynne Robinson
If you ever get a high official position in your country, you must see the interests of the humanity much more important than the interests of your own country; only then you will deserve to be called a great man!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning.
— Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary
I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision.
— Vanessa Veselka, Zazen
We all know the true nature of the human soul, because we have all looked into the eyes of children, and saw ourselves looking back.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Being happy at others cost...not a sign of humanity.
— Adil Adam Memon
humans have a global benchmark-standard of conduct that called humanity
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
— George Orwell, 1984
We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.
— Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems
Your friend Mikey knew what my touch could do, but he didn’t tell me. He turned me into a murderer. Worse than a murderer.”“I think,” said Nick, “they call that manslaughter or wrongful death, don’t they? I mean, when it’s an accident or out of ignorance, or something.”Clarence turned to Nick, studying him with his Everlost eye. “You’re a lot smarter than you were back in the cage,” Clarence said. “You look better too. Back then you were a thing, now you’re almost a person.”“Thanks . . . but ‘almost’ is still ‘almost.’”“Yeah, well, we’re all almost something.
— Neal Shusterman, Everfound
The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno
I've learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, and preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of a deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all--and the foundation for our collective survival.
— Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
I wish I had been born a storm. No heart, no tears, just a terrible gale'd been good.
— Kohta Hirano
Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses
— Frank Herbert
Man tames not vengeance
—  vengeance breaks the man.
Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.
— Gore Vidal, Visit to a Small Planet and Other Television Plays
But then again...perhaps the whole human race is cursed, and I'm simply in the lower echelon and therefore lose everything first.
— Ondrelique C. Ouellette
The only language all human beings understand is the language of humanity.
— Ken Bugul, Le Baobab Fou
I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask:‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
He shrugged. - They're just people - he said. - They're just doing what people do. Sir.Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile.- Of course, of course - he said. - You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
— George Orwell
The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to it's ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...
— Irène Némirovsky
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.
— Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden
Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.
— Anthony Hiss, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside
People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice - of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves - appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls "the beauty we have paid for with our shame." Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.
— Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
— C.S. Lewis
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.
— Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House
Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.
— Philip Caputo, Indian Country
If God in all of His infinite power and love were real to us, the opinions of men, either for or against us, and the honor or dishonor they may bestow would shrink into nothingness in comparison.
— Dave Hunt, An Urgent Call To A Serious Faith
A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.
— Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly
People create sins out of nothing and in doing so have enslaved their fellow man! Man is not bound by sin but man is bound by the idea that almost everything he is doing is a sin!
— C. JoyBell C.
Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!
— Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog
The day you give priority to bogus ethics over human reactions, you become a loser. Human reactions are priceless. Rules should never, ever stifle emotions. Tennis is a very human game facing a great danger that it will be strangulated in a cat's cradle of unnecessary or inhumane rules.
— Ted Tinling
Mankind without Earth is Humanity without a Home
— S.G. Rainbolt
The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.
— J.G. Ballard
Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
— Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.
— Leon Uris, QB VII
No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
— Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader
Turn back to humanity – to the world – to love! Become gardeners – whatever you want! – become nothing! – and the whole of space will be free for you.
— Alfred Wolfenstein