human nature quotes

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.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

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.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

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.

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.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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 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.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

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

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

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

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.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

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

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

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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

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

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

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

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.

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

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.

Nature is not human hearted.

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.

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

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.

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

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

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

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.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

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

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.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

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

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

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.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

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

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.

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

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.