Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them.
Everywhere man blames nature and fate yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passion, his mistakes and his weaknesses.
A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man.
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark.
People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Poverty is... Curable like any disease. Ignorance, dependence, inefficiency, laziness, want of the spirit of enterprise are the real real causes of poverty.
A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.
The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
A man is great by deeds, not by birth.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
It’s extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.