Quotes About Human nature

No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It would be needless to point this out if the unscrupulous were not always saying the opposite. It's so small a thing, the life of man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task. I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot.

Then at once "human nature" is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for "human nature" has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. "Man" can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men. I

quem dividisse o que houvesse para comer teria de ficar com a parte mais pequena, reveladora de um compreensão da natureza humana que, se tivesse sido aplicada a muitas outras coisas mais importantes, teria transformado a história do mundo.

As Plautus said, lupus est homo homini. Man is a wolf to man. Inhumanity is often at its worst inside the family.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

Homo sapiens sapiens, the shy, murderous ape, may be spreading pestilence and pollution on a global scale, but his violent instincts at least seem to have been triumphantly tamed.

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

It is in our nature to enjoy atrocity so long as it continues to shock and remains comfortably removed from our own lives.

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

What does it mean to be human, to be good, to be moral, to be all three at once? It means that flawed beings often must choose between two flawed options.

After all, he was human, in spite of rumors to the contrary.

Why are people so fucked up?" I asked "Maybe you do need college, Poiter," Everett said. "You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that's about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It's because they're people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The

The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." – GENESIS 8:21

strive to accept the existential fact that the human feeling nature is often contradictory and frequently vacillates between opposite polarities of feeling experiences.

Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

I don't understand why you need verbal trickery to ensnare a temporary mate," Tochee said. "Are you not attracted to each other by what you are?

As if we didn't have enough weapons already. But that's human nature, we've always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch.

All because I was too stupid to learn from past mistakes. Just like all the other dreaming fools throughout history, wrapped up with seductive, clean equations, their simplistic, isolated elegance, giving no thought to the messy, bloody, physical application that was their ultimate reality. As if we didn't have enough weapons already. But that's human nature, we've always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch. And for what?

Does my willingness to do my duty make the human race a bunch of dangerous killers?

People simply couldn't resist watching someone else's misfortune.