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

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.

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

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

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

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

All men are equal before fish.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

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

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church’s credibility.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

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.

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.

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

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

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?

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

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

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

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.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

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

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.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

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.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

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.

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

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

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.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

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!‘

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.

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.