Quotes About Human nature

the human nature whose strong quality it brings out and reveals. To attribute any nobility to war itself is as much a confusion of thought as to attribute nobility to cancer or leprosy, because of the skill, devotion and self-sacrifice of those who give up their lives to its cure.

The Greeks took envy to be part of human nature, running at differing intensities in differing people, but always there, ever ready to emerge, like a coiled snake, seemingly asleep but easily stirred into poisonous attack.

The job, in Schopenhauer's steady view, is rarely brought off in a successful way. For in "the boundless egotism of our nature there is joined more or less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancor, and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent's tooth, and waiting only an opportunity of venting itself and then, like a demon unchained, of storming and raging." Not exactly what we should nowadays call a fun guy, Schopenhauer.

If the novel is an instrument of discovery, what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all great mysteries, human nature.

There is wisdom in madness, and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everybody is capable of everything.

Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good.

We are beasts and this is our consolation.

In real life, as I mentioned in the first chapter, people don't try to have feelings, and frequently they try not to have them.

It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Mysteriously, God in his providence must make use of our tragedies to remind our fallen human nature of his presence and his love, of the constancy of his concern and care for us. It is not vindictiveness on his part; he does not send us tragedies to punish us for having so long forgotten him. The failing is on our part.

This tendency to set acceptable conditions upon God, to seek unconsciously to make his will for us coincide with our desires, is a very human trait.

The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount -- 'this is the Law and the Prophets' -- makes little sense.

The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things.

All histories do show, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution.

I do not think poor human nature so sorry a piece of workmanship as they would make it out to be; and as far as I have observed, I am fully satisfied that man, if left to himself, would about as readily go right as wrong. It is only this eternally sounding in his ears that it is his duty to go right which makes him go the very reverse. The

When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

whether or not people get the gods that they deserve, they tend to get the gods (and demons) that their animals deserve—

In spite of everything she did that she shouldn't have done, and everything she didn't do that she should have, something that felt like love was in her and she would take it out at times like this and show it to us and make us hunger for more. All of us, each in our own way.

An open relationship allows you to be a better lover to yourself as well as to others. It opens your perception and helps you cope with the reality of human nature, which is to seek out love, to give love, and to receive love over and over again in its many forms and many faces. One

A man without mysticism becomes a monster.

Yet such is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.