Quotes About Human nature

Man made God in his own image, so it's natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man's made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It's his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.

Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else, an absolute ignorance.

Why do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't time to disguise itself? Nobody here could talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child?

Human nature too has curious twisted reasons that the heart certainly knows nothing of. It eased the conscience of many small men to feel that they were working for

Why doesn't hatred kill desire?

You don't understand. Speaking, talking--language, that is--represents the most orderly, civilized, and rational expression of human nature. All this foul-mouthed cussing is a gap where you can't think of anything to say. It's the opposite of being rational and ordered. The very opposite. It wants to unpick civilized behavior, rationality, and order.

Willie Stark's eternal rule: There is always something.

Hannah Arendt had it right: evil is incomprehensibly banal. The existentialists went her one better: it's also absurd, and terrifyingly so.

At that moment they ceased being human beings and began to be human doings.

It's a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.

Anarchists...' I began and then faltered. 'No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don't, any more. So, no--I guess I'm not an anarchist now.

It's a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

We all have them, those parts of us that are the greatest parts of us and the worst parts of us. Sometimes we're put in circumstances and bad choices are made.

How do people move on after they've lost the love of their life? It's a really interesting thing to look at. It happens to people every day: you see people... even in the worst, most war-torn places, people get up and continue with their lives. And it's a fascinating thing about human nature. That ability to just continue on.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

We should expect the best and the worst of mankind, as from the weather.

I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.

Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.