HUMANITY
See also: Human nature; Mankind; Relationships
You will be like God, knowing good and evil.
The Bible, Genesis 3:5
All flesh is grass.
The Bible, Isaiah 40:6 kjv
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
The Bible, Jeremiah 13:23 kjv
Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.
The Bible, Psalm 8:5 kjv
I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
The Bible, Psalm 139:14 kjv
God made man to be somebody, not just to have things.
Author unknown
Bible’s description of the human body:
a. At birth: “The Lord formed man from the dust of the earth” Genesis 2:7.
b. At death: “The dust returns to the ground it came from.” Ecclesiastes 12:7.
Author unknown
People are funny; they spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
Author unknown
Biologist’s view of the human body:
The human body has 206 bones, weighing only 20% of the body; 600 muscles. Its lungs have over 3 million tiny air sacs. Nearly 100,000 kilometers of arteries and capillaries transport 6 liters of blood around the body, over 1,000 times a day. 60% of the body is fluid and 95% of the body’s weight consists of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus and calcium – six of the most common elements.
Author unknown
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong
The times have never hurt anyone. Those who are hurt are human beings; those by whom they are hurt are also human beings. So, change human beings and the times will be changed.
Augustine of Hippo
I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the devil.
Augustine of Hippo
Why presume so much on the capability of nature? It is wounded, maimed, vexed, lost. The thing wanted is genuine confession, not false defense.
Augustine of Hippo
We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
Karl Barth
But man, in so far as he is the image of the divine being, that is, in so far as he is a symbol of divinity, has a precise and absolute meaning and significance. When his mind is turned towards the divine world he discovers everywhere an inner connection and meaning: the indications of another world are apparent to him.
N. Berdayev
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man, so he sees.
William Blake
Man is the great mystery of God, the microcosm, or complete abridgement of , God’s masterpiece, a living emblem and hieroglyphic of eternity and time.
Jacob Boehme
A pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan, and the whole thing fixed upon stilts.
Samuel Butler’s description of the human body.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle
A self-made man? Yes, and worships his creator.
Henry Austin Clapp
We are each of us angels with only one wing. And we can only fly embracing each other.
Luciano De Creschenzo
The greatest organized wrongs which the civilized world has seen perpetrated in modern times, upon the well-being of mankind, have been committed under the amiable name of humanity.
R.L. Dabney
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, opening line of A Tale of Two Cities
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
Most people who visit psychiatrists suffer from an inner deadness. They live in the midst of plenty and are joyless.
Erich Fromm
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
Edward Gibbon
Man is the viceregent of God’s world. He is also the rebel in God’s world, and the object of God’s love. The image of God is there, albeit so marred. The wonder of it all is that this image can be restored in Christ.
Michael Green
The proud man hath no God; the envious man hath no neighbor; the angry man hath not himself. What good then, in being a man, if one has neither himself nor a neighbor nor God?
Joseph Hall
Man is a make-believe animal – he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
William Hazlitt
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
William Hazlitt
Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.
Irenaeus
I hate mankind, for I think myself to be one of them, and I know how bad I am.
Samuel Johnson
Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
Samuel Johnson
Human nature is like a drunk peasant. Lift him into the saddle on one side, over he topples on the other side.
Martin Luther
Men love to be encouraged by false hopes; the world is full of quack remedies for sin.
J. Gresham Machen
Only two great groups of animals, men and ants, indulge in highly organized mass warfare.
Charles H. Maskins
All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a nearly infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting but persistent effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built.
Robert McNamara
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men!
Herman Melville
The misery of man is derived from his idolatry, from his partly conscious and partly unconscious effort to make himself, his race, and his culture God.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.
Blaise Pascal
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
Blaise Pascal
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners, and the rest, sinners who believe themselves righteous.
Blaise Pascal
There is a God-shaped blank in every heart.
Blaise Pascal
What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!
Blaise Pascal
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal
What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, all in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.
Blaise Pascal
The world is a spiritual kindergarten, where thousands of bewildered infants are trying to spell GOD with the wrong blocks.
Edward Arlington Robinson
God made man a little lower than the angels, and he has been getting a little lower ever since.
Will Rogers
Man is an empty bubble on the sea of nothingness.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Albert Schweitzer
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Better contraceptives will control the population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior.
B. F. Skinner
Man and woman are one body and soul.
The Talmud
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.
Mark Twain
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.
Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
Man is nothing so much as a lump of muddy earth plunged into a very clear, pure brook.
Ulrich Zwingli