Humanity

"You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again."

"As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt. What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet."Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself."

"Sometimes I can feel my darkness, like a fragment of nerves inside of me somewhere, sparking my hate. I picture it moving throughout my body, the other cells letting it pass by, yielding to its master. It moves to my tongue when it wants me to spew beautiful, damaging words, it moves to my hands when it wants me to feel all it can take away, and it moves to my eyes to blind me from truly seeing the destruction I’ve done."

"I have found that sometimes when a person gives up on 'humankind' they can often find trust and love in animal kind. André Chevalier"

"The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison."

"Utterances of cursed language defiles the hearts and souls of man and many."

"A person’s words reflect the image of his character and the amount of truth and lies in it is always visible to the human heart than ordinary eyes."

"How can we know something that surpasses or is beyond knowledge? How can we know something that is beyond words?... We can and do use words to point to all of our human experiences. However, the experience of "God as Agape" is beyond words, beyond the limitations of our minds."

"When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images."

"Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness."

"Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement."

"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human."

"Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness."

"Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art."

"The capital ... shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. ... One-fifth to the person having made the most important discovery or invention in the science of physics, one-fifth to the person who has made the most eminent discovery or improvement in chemistry, one-fifth to the one having made the most important discovery with regard to physiology or medicine, one-fifth to the person who has produced the most distinguished idealistic work of literature, and one-fifth to the person who has worked the most or best for advancing the fraternization of all nations and for abolishing or diminishing the standing armies as well as for the forming or propagation of committees of peace."

"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."

"Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity.[Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]"

"AND where did the books go when the world turned against them? When the flames of wrath blackened their pages and erased the words, they fled to find solace and redemption in the dark places of the world.“They were exiled into darkness so their own light might one day return to illuminate the world. They went underground, literally and metaphorically, so that their haven became the hidden places far beneath the feet of their persecutors.“Thus was born the Incunabula: it was forged by fire and persecution, to preserve and protect until the book might rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of demise."

"Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ..."