Quotes on Human Nature

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

It's not human nature to be great. It's human nature to survive, to be average and do what you have to do to get by. That is normal. When you have something good happen, it's the special people that can stay focused and keep paying attention to detail, working to get better and not being satisfied with what they have accomplished.

Out of defeat can come the best in human nature. As Christians face storms of adversity, they may rise with more beauty. They are like trees that grow on mountain ridges -- battered by winds, yet trees in which we find the strongest wood.

As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly

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

More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.

The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

We are human behind and this part of our human nature that we don't learn the importance of anything until it's snatched from our hands. In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, and that time I realized that education is very important, and education is the power for women. And that's why the terrorists are afraid of education. They do not want women to get education because then women will become more powerful.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.

During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights.