human nature quotes

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

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

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

Desire is the very essence of man.

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

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

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

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?

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.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

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.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

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

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

The lie is a condition of life.

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.

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

Man is a universe within himself.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

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

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

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

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

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

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.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

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

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

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

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

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Desire is the essence of a man.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

All men are equal before fish.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

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

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

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

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

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

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

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

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.