Quotes About Human nature

You meet people, and you're like, 'I don't know how I feel about you,' and someone does something surprising that changes your mind. We're interesting creatures; we're nuanced, complicated and layered, and we make all sorts of choices.

It is part of our human nature to want to be liked. It is part of our human nature to worry about what others think of us. It is an attribute of greatness and of American exceptionalism to not surrender to our nature, but to be guided by an inner calling to persevere and to prevail, no matter the personal cost.

I believe it is entirely possible for a man to possess not a single one of the virtues, to be a demon in human flesh.

She sighed. "All men are the same." "So are all women—after the first nine.

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.

and if the stepmother was irredeemable, it's because she's all of us: insatiable, craving and its underbelly, selfishness incarnate. She's who we all are when we feel poor amid plenty.

The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures—but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.

ONE OF THE things that meditation teaches us, when we slowly descend into ourselves, is that the sense of peace already exists in us. We all have a deep desire for it even if it's often hidden, masked, thwarted. If we examine human nature carefully, it is good, well disposed, helpful. And it seems to me that nowadays the spirit of harmony is increasing, that our desire to live together calmly is growing stronger and stronger; it's more and more widespread.

Nllum homin est perpetuum bonum.

I distinguish two types of human beings, Love people, who love the sky and the flowers, and Power People, who are essentially sold on naked power.

Sure they're animals. You think you just found out a new principle? Sometimes I wonder just how naive you really are. The French lords and ladies used to screw after the guillotinings. The old Romans used to stuff each other during the gladiatorial matches. That's entertainment, Garraty. It's nothing new.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.

It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

Of course, coaches are Humans. They tend to do things the way they have always been done, because those decisions will not be second-guessed by the boss. As Keynes noted, following the conventional wisdom keeps you from getting fired.

Humans, short- lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.

Pase lo que pase –escribió Flaubert cuando estalló la guerra franco-prusiana–, seguiremos siendo unos estúpidos.» ¿Simple pesimismo jactancioso? ¿O se trata de la necesaria aceleración de las expectativas, cuando aún no se puede pensar, actuar o escribir adecuadamente?

He was all too aware of the failings of his species and he knew how to use them to his advantage. A fascinating skill. A useful one. But hardly a loving one.

Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

Long-lasting peace … is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of war when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … human nature loves sudden swift changes.

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds and its very self.

men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government.