Human Nature Quotes

Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.

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.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.

Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds.

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

One man's gospel truth is another man's blasphemous lie. The dangerous thing about people is the way we'll try to kill anyone whose truth doesn't agree with ours.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.

People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things that are larger than their own lives, and more romantic, and not necessarily of their own experiences.

It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough?

It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can’t expect an unhealthy person to think logically.

Of all the doctrines of the Bible none is so offensive to human nature as the doctrine of God's sovereignty.

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it.

Arbitrage human nature. It's not going to change any time soon.

Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.

No matter how happy anyone is with their choices, I believe it's human nature to wonder about the path not taken.

Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt.

[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature.

The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.

Alexander Hamilton realized that warfare was part and parcel of human nature, and it's something we had to prepare for.

All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.

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.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Governments never do any great good things from mere principle, from mere love of justice ... You expect too much of human nature when you expect that.

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertion of human nature; and what nature will he honour who honours not the human?

I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more.

Humans have always wondered the big questions, "Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?" It's part of human nature. It's perhaps the underpinnings of religion.

No one chooses what does not rest with himself, but only what he thinks can be attained by his own act.

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.

People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.