Quotes About Human nature

Well, then, biting, kicking, wanton imprisonment and beheading – is that what our nature entails? No; rather, acts of kindness, cooperation and good will. And so, whether you like it or not, a person fares poorly whenever he acts like an insensitive brute.

What's odd in asserting that what's bad for anything is what runs contrary to its nature? You say it for everything else, why make humanity the sole exception?

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven and who believed that nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

It is the task of the science of man to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called human nature is but one of its many manifestations - and often a pathological one - and the function of such mistaken definition usually has been to defend a particular type of society as being the necessary one.

As long as human nature is what it is, I'm afraid there will always be another war

It takes a man to know men and all the wickedness mixed up in their flesh and blood.

Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind and finds the readiest responses.

The great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets—do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave and have always craved. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.

It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.

Querido, sabido es que la envidia y la maledicencia humana no tienen fin. Pues si bien la inteligencia tiene un limite, la tontería y la malicia no tienen fondo visible o alcanzable

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.

It is a human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde.

Signori, i pinguini sono malcontenti del nuovo regime, perché, anche se ne traggono profitto, è naturale per gli uomini lamentarsi della propria condizione.

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.

Qu'en savez-vous? dit le docteur. Mais quoi qu'il en soit, le nombre des épouses varie simplement comme le mode d'alimentation de l'espèce. Les lapins, les Turcs, les moutons, les artistes, et d'une façon générale tous les herbivores sont polygames; les renards, les Anglais, les loups, les banquiers, et d'une façon générale tous les carnivores sont monogames.

Then she turned on him in a hundred small ways, each of them minor and not unusual when one human being lived with another, but this was like saying that a typhoon was nothing more than single drops of rain pushed by a little wind.

What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Filosofii susÈ›in c? omul e pervertit de societate È™i de proasta guvernare. (...) Nu, violatorul s?l??luia în noi ca un virus È™i nici o societate ideal? nu ne-ar fi putut t?m?dui.