Quotes About Human nature

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate. The thought of missing it was eased when she

Pre?o sa ?udia chvascú, že sú citlivejÅ¡í ako zvieratá? Tým sú len bezbrannejÅ¡í; keby sme nemali iných potrieb, iba hlad a smäd a telesné túžby, boli by sme takmer slobodní; takto nás rozochveje každu?ký závan vetra, každý poh?ad, náhodné slovo.

Einstein's Monsters, by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.

In such times one realises to what a sad species of animal one belongs.

To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will. But inasmuch as man, because of his nature as the thinking animal and by virtue of forming ideas, is related to beings in their Being, is thereby related to Being, and is thus determined by Being—therefore man's being, in keeping with this relatedness of Being (which now means, of the will) to human nature, must emphatically appear as a willing.

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.

Something he had read came into his head, that André Malraux had once asked an elderly priest what he had learned of the human race after a lifetime of hearing confessions, and the priest had replied, "That there are no grown-ups.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone. —John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for.

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

Die Geschichte hat uns gelehrt, dass man ihr häufiger mit der Lüge als mit der Wahrheit dienen muss, denn ihr Material, der Mensch, ist träge und muss vor jeder neuen Stufe seiner Entwicklung erst vierzig Jahre durch die Wüste geführt werden. Und man muss ihn durch die Wüste treiben mit Drohungen und Lockungen, mit erlogenen Schrecken und erlogenem Trost, damit er sich nicht vorzeitig zur Ruhe setzt und mit der Anbetung goldener Kälber vergnügt.

History has taught us that it must be served more frequently with lies than with the truth, because its human material is by nature sluggish: before every new stage of development the people must first be led through the wilderness for forty years—driven on with threats and enticements, with false frights and feigned consolation, so that they do not stop to rest and entertain themselves with the worship of golden calves.

Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial means. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology inherent in man's nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves.

To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

Sociability belongs to the most dangerous, even destructive inclinations, since it brings us into contact with beings the great majority of whom are morally bad and intellectually dull or perverted.

In savage countries they eat one another, in civilized they deceive one another; and that is what people call the way of the world!

Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.

Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cioè non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanità dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarrà dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia.

It can truly be said: Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

However much the plays and the masks on the world's stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.