human nature quotes

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

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.

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

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

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.

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

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

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

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

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

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

Fear is the mother of morality.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

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.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

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

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.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

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.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

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.

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.

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.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

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

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Hell is other people.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

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.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

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

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

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

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

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.

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

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!‘

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

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

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

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.

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

If you’re going to wake up early all the time, and you’re working hard, and you’re working out, sometimes you’re going to get tired. It’s OK. It’s acceptable – somewhat. We’re all human, unfortunately.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

To be is to do.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.