Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

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 story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

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

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Prayer is a confession of one’s own unworthiness and weakness.

You can’t trust very many people.

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 greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

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

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

Hell is other people.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

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.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

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.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

All men are equal before fish.

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

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

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

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

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

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

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

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.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

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.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

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

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