HUMANISM • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Humanism

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noun

Humanism n.

Human nature or disposition; humanity. "(She) looked almost like a being who had rejected with indifference the attitude of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism."

The study of the humanities; polite learning.

A doctrine or ethical point of view that emphasizes the dignity and worth of individual people, rejects claims of supernatural influences on humans, and stresses the need for people to achieve improvement of society and self-fulfillment through reason and to develop human-oriented ethical values without theism.

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Etymology of 'Humanism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Humanism" Quotes from Famous Books

... humanism of the planter gentry did much to assure the people that they had little to fear from their "betters". The gentry served because they believed in noblesse oblige—with power and privilege went responsibility. Honor, duty, and devotion to public and class interest called them to office, ...

— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic in its character, aiming at ...

— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... shirking contact with the unlovely phases of experience, but by resolutely accepting the ministry of sorrow they impose, {109} that we attain to our highest selves. The narrow Puritanism of a past age may need the corrective of the broader Humanism of to-day, but not less must the Ethic of self-culture be reinforced by the Ethic of self-sacrifice. We may not cultivate the beauty of life at the cost of duty, nor forget that it is often only through the immolation of self that the self can ...

— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... boy, or even for a man, to be what is called a "good scholar," and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or literature of Greece and Rome; and the examination system undoubtedly tends to foster this bastard type of humanism. But when, as a result of his school and University training, a scholar has passed the linguistic portals and found pleasure in the worlds beyond, we may say of him that his education has fostered ...

— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

Words linked to "Humanism" : ism, philosophy, doctrine, humanitarianism, philosophical system, school of thought, cultural movement, humanist