Quotes About Human nature

The human being delivered to himself, without any partiality for elegance, is a monster.

L'histoire est une leçon d'inhumanité. Pas une goutte de sang du passé ne peut troubler le présent où je suis.

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days

Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

What could be more absurd than to assemble a crowd to witness a man and woman promising to love each other for the rest of their lives, when we know what human creatures are, — men so thoroughly selfish and unprincipled, women so vain and frivolous?

It is very questionable in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!

Passions are as mean as they are cruel.

Most people are constantly perpetrating little acts of violence on others, even when they don't mean to.

Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.

Human beings were such ridiculously predictable creatures.

But wasn't that what so many marriages were—finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring or irritating?

There is a Jewish joke concerning the man who says of an enemy: Why does he hate me so? I never did him any good.

Wickedness is too common in the world for us to think much of why and wherefore. It is more natural to ask about the rarer thing and wonder why people sometimes do good.

But some things never change. No matter what else happens in the universe—the fall of communism, the destruction of the ozone, the death of punk rock, whatever—you can at least put your faith in one thing: If a man is pretty, available, and breathing, Tommy will stick his dick in him.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.

Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

I'm acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I've thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist.

It's the nature of man to give and receive - to be man and woman, all in one.