Human Nature Quotes

Not much more than a broke disgrace who's hooked on tonics, so excuse him if his poker face has puke on it.

As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant.

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.

Lin Yutang

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

Joseph Epstein

We've all got our own brand of crazy.

Meg Mitchell Moore

There’s something about human nature which draws us to people who are authentic and makes us want to repel those that aren’t.

Rachael Bermingham

Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.

Marge Piercy

Every time the sky cries, it is because an angel has died... Lucifer started a war in Heaven, and it persists even now. So if God cannot keep his angels under control, what makes you believe that he can keep humanity under control?

Lionel Suggs

Pride,’ observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.

Jane Austen

Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves.

Louise Penny

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.

Annie Dillard

Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat

Gregory B. Sadler

Ten minutes ago, Frank though he was going to prison. Now he knows he’s not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he’s getting out of this at all, but he’s not. He’s not glad. He’s furious. He’s known the world is broken for a long time, he’s known that, but sometimes he’s amazed at how broken; even now, at this point in his life, nearing fifty years old, he can stumble across something that makes him realize all over again that the world is not only broken, but beyond fixing. No amount of glue can ever make it right. And yet, you have to focus on your little part of it, don’t you? You have to focus on your little corner of the world and glue what cracks you can. Otherwise there’s no hope at all.

Ryan David Jahn

Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is. -- Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)

Nigel Hey

To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.

Leon Eisenberg

You can spend your life judging people or, you can spend it making friends. Take your pick.

Carroll Bryant

Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image

Dean Koontz

schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It’ll turn me into a weapon,’ I say, my voice suddenly loud. ‘All you got to do is curl your hands into fists and you turn into a weapon,’ says Jim. ‘Your body is just another tool. This technology changes nothing; it only amplifies. You decide how to use your tools. Whether to do good or evil.

Daniel H. Wilson

There’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot…It’s significant…Because somebody has to take them in…And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…You move out of your isolation and become universal.

Andre Dubus

People grow, but they don't change.

Elizabeth Bard

Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.

Brian Bowers

They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

Thomas Hardy

Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.

Thomas Hardy

No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.

Brian Herbert

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

Richard Russo

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

Herman Melville

we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.

Paulo Coelho

I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Christopher Marlowe

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet

George Orwell

If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.

Saul Bellow

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.

Aberjhani

Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.

Richard Kadrey

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

William Golding

Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.

Aberjhani

I have discovered that the world over, unusual weather prevails at all times of the year.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.

Joseph Conrad

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

Zora Neale Hurston

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

Hermann Hesse

It is human nature to try hardest to accomplish the very thing we are told is impossible. Why? Because innately we know that nothing's impossible.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspiciousof swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountainclimbers.

Yann Martel

Distance reflects the true intensity of the relationship.. Some people come too close & Some forgets that u exist too..

Vineet Upadhyay

You don't invent circumstances, but when they happen they reveal human nature.

Louis Khan

I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world.

Lionel Suggs

Ego is the world's worst narcotic

Mekael Shane

To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.

Harlan Ellison

For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".

Lionel Shriver

Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.

Leslie McFarlane

Human beings feel an obligation to have a definate opinion on issues they can never truly know. They need to learn to be satisfied with "I don't know".

Nathanie Randall

History is a record of human nature in action.

James Carlos Blake

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

H.L. Mencken

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!

William Golding

the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.

Charles Bukowski

When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,—is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?

Arthur Schopenhauer

Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The human soul is an abyss

Fernando Pessoa

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

Lawrence Block

...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.

Dianna Hardy

Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.

Josephine Tey

It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief taht simple solutions exist

Steven Erikson

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Human Nature Quotes

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