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Quotes about Hope

Quotes about Humanity


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258 art quotes about Humanity found | Share this page of quotes about Humanity on Facebook

In my art, the depiction of the human figure is everything. (Sigmund Abeles)

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. (M. H. Abrams)

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. (Scott Adams)

The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling. (Christopher Alexander)

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race. (Fred Allen)

As in the rankest soil the most beautiful flowers are grown, so in the dark soil of poverty the choicest flowers of humanity have developed and bloomed. (James Allen)

While people share much with other living creatures, the desire for beauty, the capacity for self-reflection, and the longing for eternity are distinctively human qualities. (Juliette Aristides)

I want to make high art that is funny, outrageous and also reveals the human condition, which is not always high. (Robert Arneson)

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it. (Margaret Atwood)

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being. (Francis Bacon)

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. (Sir Francis Bacon)

The well being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. (Baha'u'llah)

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance. (Honore de Balzac)

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (Samuel Beckett)

Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfilment of animal desires. (Alexander Graham Bell)

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for. (Saul Bellow)

I believe that man's spirit deserves to be acknowledged, honored and celebrated. Perhaps our great cave artists understood the need for beautiful and hopeful thinking in action. (Philippe Benichou)

In truth, we are all part of the team of humanity. And as such, we are all obligated to share ourselves, and our talents, for the sake of the team. (Yehuda Berg)

It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then. (Ingmar Bergman)

-Games People Play...
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs. (Eric Berne)

When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity. (Henry Beston)

This new discipline - which I call social sculpture - can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking. (Joseph Beuys)

man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. (Ambrose Bierce)

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? (Hieronymus Bosch)

We are anthill men upon an anthill world. (Ray Bradbury)

My hope with these [paintings], because they are a little more interesting than a pretty face, is that there will be a connection with our human side and a connection with the faces in our own lives. (Rich Brimer)

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created. (Jacob Bronowski)

The Human Being is the only species on earth that creates its own predators. (Jami Buck)

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. (Charles Bukowski)

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning. (Samuel Butler, novelist)

To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind: / All are not fit with them to stir and toil, / Nor is it discontent to keep the mind / Deep in its fountain. (Lord Byron)

-CNN.com, March 18, 2012...
Our culture is biased against quiet and reserved people, but introverts are responsible for some of humanity's greatest achievements. (Susan Cain)

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. (Thomas Carlyle)

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves. (Rachel Carson)

Human faces are such a world! (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree. (Pablo Casals)

There's a basic human weakness inherent in all people which tempts them to want what they can't have and not want what is readily available to them. (M. Kathleen Casey)

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. (Willa Cather)

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still. (Anton Chekhov)

I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism. (Judy Chicago)

-The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times...
Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity. (Pema Chodron)

Human beings are of three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death. (Winston Churchill)

It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. (Sir Kenneth Clark)

We all do better when we work together. Our differences do matter, but our common humanity matters more. (Bill Clinton)

People fascinate me. Consciously or unconsciously, I have been studying their behavior all my life. (David Cobley)

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. (Leonard Cohen)

Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin. (Frank Moore Colby)

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions. (Charles Caleb Colton)

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws. (Pat Conroy)

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. (Doug Coupland)

Know people for who they are rather than for what they are. (Anthony J. D'Angelo)

O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall? (Dante)

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. (Charles Darwin)

When everyone is too busy, don't expect a more productive society. Expect a frantic society. (Jeff Davidson)

We are a very, very unusual species. (Richard Dawkins)

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. (Daniel Dennett)

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? (Isak Dinesen)

No man is an island / Entire of itself / Every man is a piece of the continent / A part of the main. (John Donne)

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 friend's / Or of thine own were. (John Donne)

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)

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival. (Rene Dubos)

- The Man in the Iron Mask...
The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry. (Alexandre Dumas)

Man is the only animal that can be skinned more than once. (Jimmy Durante)

If I had my will I would live in a ship on the sea, and never come nearer to humanity than that! (Eleonora Duse)

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human. (Andrea Dworkin)

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Albert Einstein)

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. (T. S. Eliot)

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. (Richard Feynman)

How is the human race going to survive now that the cost of living has gone up two dollars a quart? (W. C. Fields)

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. (Gustave Flaubert)

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race. (E. M. Forster)

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. (Viktor Frankl)

All humanity is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move! (Benjamin Franklin)

I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. (Buckminster Fuller)

-American Gods...
I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars... (Neil Gaiman)

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature. (Mahatma Gandhi)

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Human nature will only find itself when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity. (Edward Gibbon)

Creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the senses for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it. (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Infinite are man's expressions of beauty and love; open your eyes your ears and your heart to them and you will unite the peoples of the world. (Alexander Girard)

There is nothing new on earth / For a person who lives long and experiences much. / In my years of youthful wandering / I have seen crystallized people. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

I hope I shall be able to make some drawings in which there is something human. (Vincent van Gogh)

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey. (Henry Graham Greene)

Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation growing in the mind of some long individual. An individual whose dreams waken him in the night while others lie contentedly asleep. (Crawford H. Greenewalt)

Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction. (Franz Grillparzer)

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. (Kendall Hailey)

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. (Dag Hammarskjold)

We need to realize that we're far more than we think we are. In this time, when a lot is going on, we have the capabilities to really live deeply and explore all the potential that we are. (Carla Hannaford)

Each generation imagines that we're all going to hell. Each generation goes through a little hell and comes out heat tempered and better than before. (Paul Harvey)

The highest grades of humanity have passed through the millstones more than once. (Henry S. Haskins)

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. (Ernest Hemingway)

Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be. (Robert Henri)

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale. (Hermann Hesse)

-fl. 30 BC - AD 10...
In a place where there are no humans, one must strive to be human. (Hillel, the Elder)

I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one. (David Hockney)

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. (Eugene Ionesco)

I see the animalistic side of human nature, and it gives scope to the contemporary human condition. We are tourists in our own lives. We often miss the bits that are real. (Charlie Isoe)

As human beings, we need to know that we are not alone, that we are not crazy or completely out of our minds, that there are other people out there who feel as we do, live as we do, love as we do, who are like us. (Billy Joel)

The common strain in my work is that in each case I celebrate a moment when the individual responded to his or her own humanity. (J. Steward Johnson, Jr.)

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. (Carl Gustav Jung)

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics. (Carl Gustav Jung)

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation. (Franz Kafka)

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe. (Franz Kafka)

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings. (Franz Kafka)

Science is global. Einstein's equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races. (Abdul Kalam)

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough. (Alan Kay)

Poor, harried humanity, in order to deal with the world at the level of animal survival, has invented labels for what it sees, and has become attached to those names; the underlying processes are hidden from dull men's eyes by the dead weight of their illusory forms. (Randy Kentfield)

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together. (Jack Kerouac)

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

There is a great deal of human nature in man. (Charles Kingsley)

A lot of good and regular art gets made because of who you talk to. No one is immune to human contact and art is not made in a vacuum. (R. B. Kitaj)

Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin. (Paul Klee)

Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain. (Paul Klee)

Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

The world of poetry, mythology, and religion represents the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it. (Joseph Wood Krutch)

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. (Dalai Lama)

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity. (Walter Savage Landor)

I never liked my own species. (Gary Larsen)

"Humanism" is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things - beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature - both organic and inorganic-to colors, shapes, and textures - to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it "Humanism." (Jacob Lawrence)

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet. (George B. Leonard)

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. (Walter Lippmann)

If humans were to model the lifestyle displayed by a healthy community of cells, our societies and our planet would be more peaceful and vital. (Bruce Lipton)

The human voice is the organ of the soul. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human. (Antonio Machado)

As we, the world, and the way we live have become more complex, we've moved further away from living in alignment with our human spirit and with the earth. (Lauren Mackler)

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. (Archibald MacLeish)

Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we'd be intolerable creatures. (Tiffany Madison)

Let knowledge be guessed by the sign of equality to all beings. (Ramana Maharshi)

Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion. (Eric Maisel)

The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way. (Eric Maisel)

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement. (Nelson Mandela)

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation. (Kerry James Marshall)

Stories - individual stories, family stories, national stories - are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. (Yann Martel)

Mankind is composed of two sorts of men – those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy. (Jose Marti)

We are dealing with a fundamental characteristic, inherent in human nature, a potentiality given to all or most human beings at birth, which most often is lost or buried or inhibited as the person gets enculturated. (Abraham Maslow)

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short. (Abraham Maslow)

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. (Henri Matisse)

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world. (Andre Maurois)

The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience himself as both subject and object at the same time. (Rollo May)

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. (Cormac McCarthy)

Including figures in a painting gives human interest and they need to be well drawn, but not necessarily in detail. (Terry McKivragan)

For most of our history, a rest during the day was considered as necessary a component of human existence as sleeping at night. (Sara C. Mednick)

Human nature is good, just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good, just as there is no water that does not flow downward. (Mencius)

-The World of Perception,, 1948...
As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man. (Ludwig von Mises)

I have always tried to maintain a sense of humanity in my work, to create something that will take on its own personality but also reflect something about our world. (Dean Mitchell)

Only life suffered can transform a symphony from a collection of notes into a message of humanity. (Dimitri Mitropoulos)

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws. (Baron de Montesquieu)

The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind. (Maria Montessori)

The eyes are a human being's best attribute. (Brad Michael Moore)

The construction of the human figure, its tremendous variety of balance, of size, of rhythm, all those things make the human form much more difficult to get right in a drawing than anything else. (Henry Moore)

If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul. (Thomas Moore)

Man is like a pebble in a mountain stream. We rub briefly on our journey to the sea. (Victor Morgan)

Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity. (Modest Mussorgsky)

You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything. (Alice Neel)

I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else. (Ben Nicholson)

I... believe painting the figure can be the most vital thing at any moment. (Graham Nickson)

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant. (Oscar Niemeyer)

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel. (Ovid)

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there. (Cesare Parvese)

There will always be those who want to make paintings of the human form with all its parts all where they should be, in spite of progress. (Philip Pearlstein)

I have saved the figure from its tormented agonized condition given it by expressionistic artists, and the cubist dissectors and distorters of the figure, and at the other extreme, I have rescued it from the pornographers, and their easy exploitations of the figure for its sexual implications. (Philip Pearlstein)

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences. (M. Scott Peck)

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky. (Fernando Pessoa)

For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. (Prince Philip)

Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen. (Walter J. Phillips)

Ain't humanity wonderful? (Karen Phinney)

How can we not see our interests have more in common than not, that we are far more alike in our humanity than different? (Karen Phinney)

Artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake. (Pablo Picasso)

Man - a being in search of meaning. (Plato)

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. (Plotinus)

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human. (Plutarch)

People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the truth, and being chased in a fun way. (Amy Poehler)

The proper study of Mankind is Man. (Alexander Pope)

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts. (Ezra Pound)

We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion. (Max de Pree)

Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization. (Alexander Pushkin)

Nature recycles itself. History repeats itself. Religion has faith in itself. Technology creates itself. Humanity loves itself. (Mark Putzke)

I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people. (Robert Rauschenberg)

We humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known - by seeking to psychologically steal it from the others - an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world. (James Redfield)

-on mountains...
Society and the company of man often make us feel sad and impotent to be small among such malignant power, chaos and competition. (Stella Reinwald)

My paints, even my landscapes, are more about people. Hopefully, they are an honest glimpse into the beauty of people's lives. (Lesley Rich)

The human image has never been forgotten in the arts. (Germaine Richier)

Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another. (Jean Paul Richter)

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. (Tom Robbins)

The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. (Edwin Arlington Robinson)

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity. (Sir Ken Robinson)

If artists go away, the soul and conscience of humanity will lose its way. (Rick Rotante)

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them. (J. K. Rowling)

Humans are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies. One of the biggest lies in the story of humanity is the lie of our imperfection. (Don Miguel Ruiz)

- b.1207 d.1273...
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival; a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all. Even if they're a crowd of sorrows... still, treat each guest honourable. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. (Rumi)

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. (Salman Rushdie)

The human body could be the measure of all things, for... in terms of head, shoulder, breast, pelvis, thigh, elbow and knee... the imagination is free to roam across a vast repertory of connotations in myth and symbol. (John Russell)

Scandal is only human. (Jerry Saltz)

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked. (May Sarton)

Fully integrated humans carry both chaos and harmony, turbulence and stillness... just like clouds. (Christine Schiff)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand. (Charles Schulz)

The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it. (George C. Scott)

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance. (Ben Shahn)

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and 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)

I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing. (Anna Deavere Smith)

Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting people off. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around. Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. There is no getting around it - people are hard to live with. (Natsume Soseki)

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. (Baruch Spinoza)

You must look into other people as well as at them. (Philip Dormer Stanhope)

Human beings lose their logic in their vindictiveness. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that. (Gertrude Stein)

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it. (John Steinbeck)

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. (Wallace Stevens)

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species. (Anthony Storr)

A human being is only interesting if he's in contact with himself. (Barbra Streisand)

There is only one history - the history of Man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one. (Rabindranath Tagore)

I care about the human race, and I strive to understand it. (Janice Tanton)

I am a man: nothing human is foreign to me. (Publius Terentius Afer, Terence)

Everyone should consider his body as a priceless gift from one whom he loves above all, a marvelous work of art, of indescribable beauty, and mystery beyond human conception, and so delicate that a word, a breath, a look, nay, a thought may injure it. (Nikola Tesla)

The figures... are not supposed to reveal anything... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him. (Wayne Thiebaud)

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. (Leo Tolstoy)

I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world. (Guillermo del Toro)

The mind of the people is like mud, from which arise strange and beautiful things. (Walter J. Turner)

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. (Desmond Tutu)

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. (Mark Twain)

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. (Mark Twain)

Mankind's role is to fulfil his heaven-sent purpose through a sincere heart that is in harmony with all creation and loves all things. (Morihei Ueshiba)

We should expect the best and the worst of mankind, as from the weather. (Marquis de Vauvenargues)

If good art is to remain good medicine for the human spirit, it must remain firmly rooted in our relationships. In the 'high art' of curatorial criticism, relationships are discarded for the sake of abstract archival critique that seldom touches anyone anywhere but in the intellect. (Gerrit Verstraete)

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. (Voltaire)

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion... Art and literature are antidotes to that. (Susan Vreeland)

HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them. (Alice Walker)

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions. (William Arthur Ward)

I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine. (Andy Warhol)

We live in an illusion that somehow we are better [than animals] because we can destroy everything... (Connie Watts)

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame. (Eudora Welty)

For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together. (Margaret J. Wheatley)

People who can give themselves every day. They're the people that I admire, they're real people. (Marco Pierre White)

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. (Alfred North Whitehead)

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. (Walt Whitman)

Misanthropes need people; without a steady supply, the misanthrope cannot fully apply his art. (Polly Whitney)

The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too. (David Whyte)

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. (Oscar Wilde)

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day. (Thornton Wilder)

In a sense, we are all victims of the misogyny and racism that exist in the world, no matter what our gender or race happens to be. (Kehinde Wiley)

We face our own humanness if we can approach a canvas or a sculpture honestly and openly. We meet ourselves. (Laura Wilhelm)

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress. (Tennessee Williams)

In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power. (Marianne Williamson)

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. (Edward O. Wilson)

A human being's first responsibility is to shake hands with himself. (Henry Winkler)

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind. (William Butler Yeats)

Human life can be lived like a poem. (Lin Yutang)

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent. (Benjamin Zander)