I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
I am human, and I think that nothing of that which is human is alien to me.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it! It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.
Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.
Be humanity evermore our goal.
Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.
I have only one passion, that for light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and which has the right to happiness.
Architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
Background photo by Mathieu Perrier on Unsplash
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.
Let's not be English, French or German any more. Let's be European. No, not European, let's be men. Let's be humanity. All we have to do is get rid of one last piece of egocentricity - patriotism.
Perhaps men entertain as many truths as falsehoods; have as many good qualities as bad; feel as many pleasures as pains. But we like to malign human nature, in order to try to raise ourselves above the common level, and to acquire for ourselves the respect of which we strive to rob it. We are so presumptuous, that we imagine we can separate our own personal interests from those of humanity in general, and malign the human race without implicating ourselves. This absurd vanity has filled books of philosophy with diatribes against human nature. Man is in disgrace with all thinkers, who rival one another in accusing him of depravity. But perhaps he may be about to rise again and recover all his virtues; nothing is permanent, and philosophy, like clothes, music, architecture, &c, has its vogues.
I do not withdraw the wise man from the category of man, nor do I deny to him the sense of pain as though he were a rock that has no feelings at all.
Humanity prefers to life reasons to live.
We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.
A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
Amiable weaknesses of human nature.
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
What history relates is only the long, heavy, confused dream of humanity.
It is by playing the man, or the woman well that one helps humanity to exist. And it is necessary: it needs you just as you need it!
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
To prefer evil to good is not in human nature and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.
Background photo by Mathieu Perrier on Unsplash
