Human Nature Quotes

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.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

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

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.

He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Human nature is the same in all professions.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.

There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.

A color stands abroad on solitary hills that silence cannot overtake, but human nature feels.

Persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should be adopted to influence the conduct of men. The opposite course would be a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree and can never be reversed.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

I'm naturally an optimist, but my basis for hope is rooted in my understanding of human nature.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

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

These are not vague inferences . . . but they are solid conclusions drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs.

Modern reality TV sets up these competitive situations to show us real human nature.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

I think what happens in the world, and I think it's part human nature and part programming, is we become an emulation of what we see. We become clones of each other.

Human consciousness becomes a terrible gift which challenges the power that gave it.

I actually think that secrets are just a part of human nature and that everybody should have some.

No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can comprehend human nature.

Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.

Human nature is violent, argumentative, fallible, and given to endless fantasizing.

I don't think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does.

Ultimately we're all faced with the same things and that's what brings us together. It's just human nature to be terrified and that doesn't necessarily manifest itself in completely different ways.

There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.

It is an amazing fact of human nature that one year we can be chopping each other up and the next year we can be sharing a pint. We seem to often devolve into conflict no matter how much we evolve...

I was reared in a pub - as a young fellow, serving in the pub I learnt far more there about human nature than I learnt in any university or school. I think it gave me a great insight into people.

One of the things I believe in is a sense of human nature.