I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

If you’re not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you’re going to be punished for them, then what’s your motivation to continue?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtues consistently.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

You can’t trust very many people.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.