Quotes on Human Nature

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

It is part of the human nature always to judge others very severely and,when the wind turns against us,always to find an excuse for our own misdeeds,or to blame someone else for our mistakes.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

People are more than just the way they look.

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

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

War grows out of ordinary human nature.

We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life.

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.