Quotes About Human nature

Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.

humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire.

It is a great evil to look upon mankind with too clear vision. You seem to be living among wild beasts, and you become a wild beast yourself. (""The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah")

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

No human being is entirely innocent

All men by their nature give praise.It is allthey can do.

I see the marks of God in the heavens and the earth, but how much more in a liberal intellect, in magnanimity, in unconquerable rectitude, in a philanthropy which forgives every wrong, and which never despairs of the cause of Christ and human virtue! I do and I must reverence human nature…. I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race.

You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." [...] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.

His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of mans heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

Taking men as they have been and are, they are subjects of passion, emotion, and instinct. Only

In the definition the word "people" was used for a class or section of the population. It is now asserted that if that section rules, there can be no paternal, that is, undue, government. That doctrine, however, is the very opposite of liberty and contains the most vicious error possible in politics. The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature. They

really believed what he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties . . . but right through every human heart" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973]).

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man.

We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices.