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.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

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

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

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.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

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

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

You can’t trust very many people.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

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

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

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?

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

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.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

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.

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?

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

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 would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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.

Man is a universe within himself.

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

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

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