HUMANITIES • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • 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

... den, and so did James Reddy soon after—a better man. Though weak, his heart was not shut to the humanities of life—and Edward's kindness, in opening his eyes to the wrong he had done one man, induced in his heart a kinder feeling towards all. He tore up his slashing article against successful men. Would that every disappointed ...

— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, who have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear didascalos over there ever read Poli ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... were two sides to such a plain issue stripped of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color of German ideals? Do we prefer the "old German god" to the culture and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... "We, too, have sinned." In our blood is all the crude materialism of a triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We, too, are ready ...

— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... of war that wiped it out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of like training with his own,—a man who, but for the curse which our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the beneficent ...

— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... set by Frank Brangwyn than anything else in the Exposition's mural decoration. Perhaps that is too faint praise, for this is a real picture. In it a victorious golden spirit, crowding aside brute force, allows the Humanities, representatives of Culture, to triumph as the guardians of Youth. The figures are human, there is strength and ease in them, and the color ...

— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

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