Quotes About Human nature

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

But we are what we are, and humans will always hate.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don't really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it's horrifying. But that's just human nature.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

We should not underestimate the ability of people to do wrong if they want to do so.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

It is no small misfortune and disgrace that, through our own fault, we neither understand our nature nor our origin.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

Current psychological priesthoods ignore the fact that the profession of psychology was originated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who recognized that the key to understanding human nature was the relationship between external stimuli and the brain.

I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.

Lincoln was a supreme politician. He understood politics because he understood human nature.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right.

Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.

She said that everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil inside ourselves, so we're able to forgive them.

The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.

Women are complicated...not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.

You know that a given in life in human nature, is that at a sporting event, a baseball game, a football game, you never introduce a politician, is because he'll be booed. I don't care if he's the most beloved person in the world, its part of the game.

In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.