Quotes about Humanity

With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.

Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed.

The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.

The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel -- and all of them are right.

Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.