Quotes About Human nature

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

Flattery is so necessary to all of us that we flatter one another to be flattered in return

You do change human nature, your own human nature, if you surrender it to Christ. Human nature can be changed here and now. Human nature has been changed in the past. Human nature must be changed on an enormous scale in the future, unless the world is to be drowned in its own blood. And only Christ can change it.

We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters. (...) low order primate elevated to high order ecclesiastical primate, elevated still further in these darkest last days to ultimate prime A grade superior being. For doing that, which my father did without thinking.

When Satan is released for a brief time at the end of the millennium, his 1000-year prison sentence has not reformed his character. He has not changed. And mankind has not changed either.

Coleridge saw the active mind as one way in which human beings were made in God's image:

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

It was an organization of obstacles and precautions—based at bottom on a profound suspicion of human nature."11 Furthermore,

And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and at all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst punishment."16 For

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is--even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned--is the source of all our troubles.

at the heart of permaculture lay a gorgeously empathetic view of human nature: people aren't inherently wasteful and greedy, but fall into those patterns because of the temptations of the modern world.

What possesses men to do such evil? Are they even human? Can't they see that when you kill someone or destroy a holy place, the faith always goes on? Don't they see that in broken hearts and ruins, something always glows?

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Why did Nature create man? Was it to show that she is big enough to make mistakes, or was it pure ignorance?

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

The age of our fathers, which was worse than that of our ancestors, produced us, who are about to raise a progeny even more vicious than ourselves.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has damned few virtues.