We’re the only animal that wakes up and doesn’t stretch.

I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It’s not heavy. I don’t have skeletons in the closet on their way out.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

I don’t have maids or servants, and my husband and I love waking up early and going to the 24-hour supermarket when there is nobody else there.

I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

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

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I think how you start the day many times determines what kind of day you’re going to have.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that’s how they’ll react. But if you say, ‚We want peace, we want stability,‘ we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

My schedule goes: wake up, running, exercise, downstairs, running shoes off, then to the shower. That’s the Jackie Chan diary.

It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

Even if you have a terminal disease, you don’t have to sit down and mope. Enjoy life and challenge the illness that you have.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

You have a nice personality, but not for a human being.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Some kinds of animals burrow in the ground; others do not. Some animals are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others use the hours of daylight. There are tame animals and wild animals. Man and the mule are always tame; the leopard and the wolf are invariably wild, and others, as the elephant, are easily tamed.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

Chimps are very quick to have a sudden fight or aggressive episode, but they’re equally as good at reconciliation.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it all just hurts.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be… a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.