The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
—Yasutani Roshi
If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.
—Virginia Woolf
Reconsider your definitions. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
—George Bernard Shaw
Stop thinking this is all there is.… Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation and bogus Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counter-balancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.… Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel.… Realize that this is the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up and crank your personal volume; right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious… there's your opening. Remember magic. And, finally, believe you are part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable.
—Mark Morford
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. 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 Chödrön
It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of [humankind] and the world with [it] .… I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny that my faith and my church can ever be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices, believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also, and perhaps against these most of all.
—Thomas Merton
It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
—Mark Twain
Discontent is at the root of the creative process: the most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way.
—Eric Hoffer
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
—May Sarton
Christ didn't say, "Love humanity as thyself," but, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and do you know why? Because your neighbor, by definition, is the person nearby, the man sitting next to you in the underground who smells, perhaps, the man next to you in the queue who maybe tries to barge ahead of you; in short, your neighbor is the person who threatens your own liberty.
—Luciano De Crescenzo
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
—Hannah Arendt
Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.
—Stewart Udall
Nature is not human hearted.
—Laozi
The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.
—Ashley Montagu