Quotes About Human nature

There was a storyline this year where Taylor lied to Brooke. It was supposed to be set up in a way that I was so outraged by her that I let it stay. I thought that was human, which was great.

When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

Automobiles are not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared.

Augustine can hold that fallen man is free to sin but not free not to sin, yet still possesses free will, because as a sinner Adam wants to sin. The will is both free and unfree

Clover is incapable of not nurturing. It can't do anything but nurture. Shakyamuni is capable of not nurturing. With a poisonous thought, he is a poisonous person. With an enlightened thought, he is an enlightened person. With his great realization, he is unlikely to slip back into poisonous ways, but he could, for he is human.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Doing one fool thing after another is not so terrible when you consider the human proclivity to do several fool things at once.

Often what we take for a kindness is just someone acting in their capacity as a human being.

Ye'll try the world soon, my lad; And, Andrew dear, believe me, Ye'll find mankind an unco squad

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals.

I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they're frightened

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. –Carl Jung

The Laws of Human Nature, 1: Master Your Emotional Self—The Law of Irrationality

Daily Law: No calling is superior to another. What matters is that it be tied to a personal need and inclination, and that your energy moves you toward improvement and continuous learning from experience. The Laws of Human Nature, 13: Advance with a Sense of Purpose—The Law of Aimlessness

Hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.

Creating this feeling of validation is the golden key that will unlock people's defenses. And we cannot survive and thrive in this highly competitive world without possessing such a power. We must discover the power that we can possess by giving people the validation they crave and lowering their defenses. And the key to making this happen in a realistic and strategic manner is to fully understand a fundamental law of human nature.

People are of infinite complexity and you can spend a lifetime watching them without ever fully understanding them

The Laws of Human Nature, 16: See the Hostility Behind the Friendly Façade—The Law of Aggression

Throughout history we witness continual cycles of rising and falling levels of the irrational. The great golden age of Pericles, with its philosophers and its first stirrings of the scientific spirit, was followed by an age of superstition, cults, and intolerance. This same phenomenon happened after the Italian Renaissance. That this cycle is bound to recur again and again is part of human nature.

We humans like to imagine that we have an objective knowledge of the world. We take it for granted that what we perceive on a daily basis is reality—this reality being more or less the same for everybody. But this is an illusion. No two people see or experience the world in the same way. What we perceive is our personal version of reality, one that is of our own creation. To realize this is a critical step in our understanding of human nature.