Quotes About Human nature

Many religious denominations teach the concept of man as wretched and stained with original sin. Original sin as taught by some religious bodies means you are bad from the moment you are born. The teaching of original sin accounts for a lot of the child-rearing practices that are geared toward breaking a child's unruly will and natural propensity toward evil.

The war had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed a risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. Men had begun to ask of everything its cash value, and to cherish, as if it were a virtue, a narrow utilitarian commonsense.

It's been said that when one of Wooden's players asked, "Coach, what happens if I point to the player who gave me the assist and he isn't watching?" Coach Wooden replied, "He will always be watching." People desire validation and encouragement. It's human nature.

People are funny. They want a place in the front of the bus, the back of the church, and the middle of the road. Tell a man there are 300 billion stars, and he will believe you. Tell him that a bench has just been painted, and he has to touch it to be sure.

Critic Samuel Johnson advised that "he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief which he purposes to remove.

William James said, "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.

And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.

Difference between God and human. God gives gives gives and forgives. But human gets gets gets gets and forgets.

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

I had been allowed to believe in man's innate goodness for the twenty-two years of my life, and I had hoped to carry the belief with me to my grave.

Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.

Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.

It is not human to be without shame and without desire.

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?