Quotes About Human nature

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

Men are almost always cruel in their neighbors' faults; and make others' overthrow the badge of their own ill-masked virtue.

The true science and study of mankind is man.

Man is not man, but a wolf to those he does not know.

Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.' – Book 3, Chapter 16

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.

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.

Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes.

In men this blunder still you find; all think their little set mankind.

The more kindness shown to an envious man, the worse he becomes.

Man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

There was not after all a single kind of strife, but on earth there are two kinds: one of them a man might praise when he recognized her, but the other is blameworthy.

Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man's accursed appetite.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation, natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.

Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.

It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh, and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.