Quotes About Human nature

Hate and love were both conceived in fear, perhaps that was why they were nearly the same thing, but only one was steeped in hope.

You can't condemn an entire species of people because of the actions of one man.

Every other animal responds to the call of sex only in "season." Man's inclination is to declare "open season.

We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

The first of the problems of human nature that we examine in this section, the one just illustrated above, is what I call the narrative fallacy.

I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that "it brought us here" arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts drive us.

So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much.

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. I do not see a "tree"; I see a pleasant or an ugly tree. It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. Something in our dear human nature makes us want to believe

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.

The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.

evil is the nature of mankind.

Human nature will not nourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.

Ecco infatti una caratteristica della maggior parte degli uomini: di diventar feroci soltanto perché è in loro potestà fare del male.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and a quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.

Then, it is true, the prosperity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years.

It is the credit of human nature that, except in the case where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

Nathaniel Hawthorne