Quotes About Human nature

The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings.

Crooked, grasping, evil-hearted people were easy to find. Honest, concerned, self-sacrificing people were harder to come by.

Despite the gulf, physical and cultural, between the United States and Japan, both societies are, in the end, made up of people, and people everywhere – when you strip away their superficial differences – are crazy.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster.

Wars don't change how people are, Archer. They just kill a bunch 'a folks and when it's over, people go back to being how they always were. Most good, some not so good.

It doesn't take much for civilized people to become animals.

One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven't treated very well; it's much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn't nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.

The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.

nobody does anything for nothing. ... it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody.

We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.

Alas, the frailty is to blame, not we For such as we are made of, such we be

Do all men kill all the things they do not love? Shylock: Hates any man the thing he would not kill? Bassanio: Every offence is not a hate at first.

Who can be wise, amazed, temp'rate, and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

When he is best he is a little worst than a man, and when he is worst he is a little better than a beast.

Tis not a year or two shows us a man. They are all but stomachs, and we all but food; They eat us hungerly, and when they are full, They belch us.

L'amor d'homes dolents es converteix en por; la por en odi, i l'odi fa que l'un, o bé tots dos, esdevinguin perill d'una mort merescuda.

Life seemed to be teaching him that the satisfaction of most appetites carried in them the seeds of frustration, that it was the common delusion of all men to imagine otherwise.

He suddenly found that the thing he had set out to prove had proved something quite different. Human nature had outmaneuvered him. For if she would not desert a friend, neither could he. •

I still don't know where the evil comes from that makes men bestial to others like you have told . . . . Perhaps it is because you have so little evil in yourself. No, no, I do not think so. That is not what I meant at all. I do not believe that ordinary men have this evil. Perhaps it is like a fever that blows in the air, like cholera, like the plague; it blows in the air and settles on men -- or a town -- or a nation -- and everyone in it, or nearly everyone, falls a victim.

the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous;

Unteachable from infancy to tomb—There is the first and main characteristic of mankind.

But human beings are, by nature, sad. So be it, then. It isn't all that bad.