#Humanity

"To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]"

"I'm not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity - or that's the hope, at least - a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it's actually kicking human frailty while it's down - I'm not sure."

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

"I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human."

"My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being...When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups...I want to speak to their souls."

"Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue)."

"The key to opening the secret of humanity is to love and understand the beauty of it."

"I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

"Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?"

"Humanity i love you because youare perpetually putting the secret oflife in your pants and forgettingit's there and sitting downon itand because you areforever making poems in the lapof death Humanityi hate you"

"We are all connected. When one arm or foot is poisoned, the whole body becomes infected."

"Rwanda can be a paradise again, but it will take the love of the entire world to heal my homeland. And that's as it should be, for what happened in Rwanda happened to us all - humanity was wounded by the genocide."

"How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world."

"I am not the same man I was 35 years ago. And I hope that five years and ten years from now, I'll be a better man, a more mature man, a wiser man, a more humble man and a more spirited man to serve the good of my people and the good of humanity."

"The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death."