Quotes About Human nature

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

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Everybody has a hero and a villain within themselves. So it depends upon you to be a hero or a villain. If you show humanity, it will give you satisfaction.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Everyone can relate to loving someone and hating them in the same moment - husbands, wives, partners, siblings, parents, friends. It's kind of universal in that way.

Man is to man either a god or a wolf.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

People first concern themselves with meeting their basic needs; only afterwards, do they pursue any higher needs.

Theology is anthropology.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory, and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact, it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work and what human beings are really like.

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

During the Enlightenment, there were brilliant thinkers who realized that, if you assume most people are naturally selfish and you construct the market around that, sometimes it can actually work for the common good. I just think that in many cases, it went too far.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door: It is a questions still worth asking today.

Since man must, to play god, hate other men, it means that this pleasure must be a solitary one and must be exacted at the price of someone's suffering.