Mankind Quotes

Religion is for man and not man for religion.

Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and culture and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them.

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

The earth, said he, has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called man.

Man is the only animal that must be encouraged to live.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness - was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen; for whoever has not two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave.

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings-this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this: How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water.

Only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his self consciousness would be immediately destroyed.