HUMANITIES • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Humanities

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/hjumˈænɪtiz/ /jumˈænɪtiz/ Listen

noun

Humanity n. (pl. humanities)

1.

The quality of being human; the peculiar nature of man, by which he is distinguished from other beings.

2.

Mankind collectively; the human race. "But hearing oftentimes The still, and music humanity." "It is a debt we owe to humanity."

3.

The quality of being humane; the kind feelings, dispositions, and sympathies of man; especially, a disposition to relieve persons or animals in distress, and to treat all creatures with kindness and tenderness. "The common offices of humanity and friendship."

4.

Mental cultivation; liberal education; instruction in classical and polite literature. "Polished with humanity and the study of witty science."

5.

pl. (With definite article) The branches of polite or elegant learning; as language, rhetoric, poetry, and the ancient classics; belles-letters. Note: The cultivation of the languages, literature, history, and archaeology of Greece and Rome, were very commonly called literae humaniores, or, in English, the humanities,... by way of opposition to the literae divinae, or divinity.

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Etymology of 'Humanities'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Humanities" Quotes from Famous Books

... solid whinstone,—quarried in Strehlen, twenty miles away, among the Hills to the right yonder, as you may guess;—road very visible to the Prussian soldier, though he does not ask where quarried. These beautiful improvements, beautiful humanities,—were done by whom? "Done in 1584," say the records, by "George the Pious;" Duke of Liegnitz, Brieg and Wohlau; 156 years ago. "Pious" his contemporaries called this George;—he was son of the ERBVERBRUDERUNG Duke, who ...

— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... to get down to Vourlah for a time, and to fly from the gaieties of the metropolis to the pleasures of the chasse at Rabbit Island. It must ever be soothing to a spirit that has not quite forgotten "the humanities," to walk upon the turf which witnessed the infant gambols of Anaxagoras; and besides that, the locality is pretty, and worthy of being visited on its own account. The town is at the distance of some miles from the Scala, which last is the grand watering-place ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... inkling for the Muses had excited his entire displeasure. He assured me one day, when I asked him for a new copy of Horace, that the translation of "Poeta nascitur non fit" was "a nasty poet for nothing fit"—a remark which I took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to "the humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... not myths nor figments of imagination. They are as natural and comprehensive as human beings. In the regular order of evolution we shall reach their level and join their ranks while younger humanities shall attain our present estate. As the supermen rose we, too, shall rise. Our past has been evolution's night. Our present is its dawn. Our future shall be its perfect day. Think of that night from which ...

— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like could be true of the education of a gentleman ...

— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

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