human nature Quotes

“We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.”

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness.”

“Perhaps…” Miss Whitlaw tapped a finger against her lips for a moment. “Perhaps the truth of the dragon lies somewhere in between the American and the Chinese versions. He is neither all-bad nor all-good, neither all-destruction nor all-kind. He is a creature particularly in tune with Nature, and so, like Nature, he can be very, very kind or very, very terrible. If you love him, you will accept what he is. Otherwise he will destroy you.”

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

“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. Why are we such fools—such tragic fools?”

“The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.”

“Fixed ideas of God and human nature are indispensable to the daily practice of men’s lives; but the practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas.”

“The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge”

“Every human being, after all, is possessed with the undeniable urge to confess his sins. Religions were built on such things. And kingdoms were conquered with the promise that all sins would be forgiven afterward.”

″[Katsa] knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed, green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, and killer that offered itself as the vessel of the king’s fury.”

Men are smart and men are animals, in that they don’t want to die so simply for so little.

“The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”

“It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that Nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another : and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself: when taking a journey, he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves.”

“We are glorious because we are not beings of this world at all. Our spiritual essence is nonmaterial, nonphysical; and when we become aware of this, we are genuinely empowered.”

“Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.”

“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”

“The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.”

“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”

“They define virtue thus—that it is a living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe that a man then follows the dictates of Nature when he pursues or avoids things according to the direction of reason.”

“We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth.”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

“For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.”

“Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader; but you know humanity comes out in a variety of strange forms now-a-days, and there is no end to the odd things that humane people will say and do.”

“‘It’s our nature. We destroy. It’s the constant of our kind. No matter the color of blood, man will always fall.‘”

Nature’s creative power is far beyond man’s instinct of destruction.

“Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth.”

” Each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature. In some, there will be high and fine characteristics which will submerge the evil ones, and those will be called good men; in others the evil characteristics will have dominion, and those will be called bad men.”

“Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.”

“How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don’t understand there are human feelings involved.”

But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.

“It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.”

“Someday you’ll find someone special again. People who’ve been in love once usually do. It’s in their nature.”

“Decades ago our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality—of humankind’s inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world’s disarray.”

“You’re my daughter. I don’t care about the factions.” She shakes her head. “Look where they got us. Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

“One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day’, ‘You’re very tall’, or ‘You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?’ At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical, and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.”

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. ‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

“It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.”

“‘Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!’ returned Duncan, at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been engrafted in his nature.”

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man.

“Twould have been a cruel and an unhuman act for a white-skin; but ‘tis the gift and natur’ of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied.”

The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

“If . . . one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.”

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”

“Humans were brutish and ungovernable. They had killed one another so frequently that murder had been an accepted part of life.”

“Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached. Were the souls the exception to that rule? Could they have the light without the darkness of the world?”

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”

“That’s the beautiful thing about being human,” he told me. “Things change.”

“Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end?”

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

“I then told them that God, to compensate for the weakness of man, had bestowed on him reason, invention, and skill in workmanship.”

We men are wretched things.

The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry.

“...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.”

“Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”

“Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience.”

“They did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.”

“It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.”

“Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

“Listen, Sam, if it was nature, nobody wouldn’t have tuh look out for babies touchin’ stoves, would they? ’Cause dey just naturally wouldn’t touch it. But dey sho will. So it’s caution.” “Naw it ain’t, it’s nature, cause nature makes caution. It’s de strongest thing dat God ever made, now. Fact is it’s de onliest thing God every made. He made nature and nature made everything else.”

“It is the nature of men to be bound by the benefits they confer as much as by those they receive.”

“From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.”

“This is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous.”

“A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy . . . through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.”

“No matter how careful I am, eventually I’ll make another misstep. I am weak. I am fragile. I am mortal.”

“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.”

“Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice everything for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people.”

“A person’s reason for doing someone a good turn matters as much as the good turn itself.”

“And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

“Look, I’m human. It’s hard to be fair sometimes. We don’t always feel the right thing, do the right thing.”

“When we merely say that we are bad, the “wrath” of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness.”

“Humans were deceitful, treacherous creatures. I couldn’t anticipate their darker agendas when such things were unthinkable to my species.”

“There is something of the dormouse in him still. Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it.”

“Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins - one after the other.”

“A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”

“Dr. Brodsky said to the audience: ‘Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. Any questions?’ ”

“You are like a river. You go through life taking the path of least resistance. We all do—all human beings and all of nature. It is important to know that.”

″... the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.”

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

“All men by nature desire to know.”

“The nature of man is a dual nature. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist.”

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

“A person can’t change all at once.”

“It is only dogs that never bite their masters.”

“That’s who we are as human beings. For the most part, we are kind.”

“The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

“You know, I read somewhere that sixty percent of us can’t go more than ten minutes without lying. Little slippages: to make outselves sound better, more attractive, to others. White lies to avoid causing offence. SO it’s not like I’ve done anything out of the ordinary. It’s only human.”

“To signify class, good taste, the kind of breeding that cannot be bought.”

“Evil is the nature of mankind.”

“Although Nature had never intended him for a man of action, loyalty to Jennings demanded that he should try his best to become one.”

“Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and turns and defenses of an instinctive guile.”

“Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.”

“Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will chose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful.”