Quotes About Human nature

If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.

seizing and incorporating...There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203]

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.

A mn ages hs enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: I hate him not because he's my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.

You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves.

Humans are animals, too, you know.

Instinctively, the spider spins the web; just as automatically, the human shields the heart.

I learned a lot about medicine in those years, but I learned more about human nature. I learned about bravery and resilience, about the many forms of grief, and especially about the importance of the little things in one's life. I've said many times that nursing taught me the value of the "little" things that individuate and define our lives—the things that ultimately make it worth living.

Since then, he'd seen so many things that defeated and demoralized him. Nobody could change the world singlehandedly. Hell, nobody could change the state child welfare system. Not unless they were able to complete an overhaul of human nature. Not unless they were able to wipe out the blackness that lurked in every person's soul.

I find that people aren't all one thing. One rather wishes they were for simplicity's sake, but isn't the truth that people are good and bad, simple and complicated, happy and sad, frightened and courageous? It's all a mix. We learn to take in everything about a person as disparate parts to the whole, and it's the whole that we love, even at moments when the other isn't who we wish her to be.

Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.

Bhuta ia, dewa ia. (Bali expression meaning Man is a demon, man is a god.)

Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds becomes mature enough for sex.

Why did anyone ever act beyond the scope of base self-interest?

I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history: How much do you love me? and Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.

I am sure I need not explain to any sensible (that is, female) reader why I woke the following morning absolutely furious with Emerson. Such are the vacillations of the human heart; and I have observed that the farther one goes in one direction, the more violent the swing in the opposite direction will be.

[On Rear Window:] I'll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, "It's none of my business." They could pull down their blinds, but they never do; they stand there and look out.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

Ethics is too fundamentally important a factor in civilization to depend upon a theological or a legal excuse; [pg 035] ethics must conform to the natural laws of human nature.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.

God, the Exalted, gave the angels intellect without desires, He gave the animals desires without intellect, and He gave both to the sons of Adam. So a man whose intellect prevails over his desires is better than the angels, whilst a man whose desire prevails over his intellect is worse than the animals.