human nature quotes

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

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.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.

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.

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

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

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.

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

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

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

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

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.