Quotes About Human nature

Wayward human nature will rebel against mental sloth. We must act, suffer, or enjoy; or the worst of all torments is ours - such restless agony as old poets figured as befalling a living soul imprisoned in the bark of a tree. We are not born to be cabbages.

Monsters, says Mary, are of our own making.

have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations.

I said, that the employments of a prosperous farmer, if they were not a more honourable, they were at least a happier species of occupation than that of a judge, whose misfortune it was always to meddle with the dark side of human nature.

A human being in perfection ought

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.

The moment people come to know love, they run the risk of carrying hate

Parler de paix tout en répandant le sang, c'est quelque chose que seul l'être humain peut faire.

homini lupus', said Plautus. 'Man is a wolf to man.

Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.

É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós. Todo mundo tem uma única e distina natureza endógena. Um self.

Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff's bombast, Iago's cunning, Leontes's jealousy, Rosalind's strength, and Malvolio's embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only

people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

Man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

You don't like people?" Raf asked. "I don't like what people do to each other.

Why. Do. People. Do. Stupid. Things. Because we're stupid, she said.

People don't change . . . You just sort of have to take them like they are.

People can't help but fill it. It's human nature, and it's what sinks a lot of murderers. This was something Stevie knew from her compulsive viewing of interrogations on YouTube.

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.

Men differ in their virtues, if any," said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, "but they are alike in their vices.

In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.' "A