Human Nature Quotes - Page 2

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence.

Space is limitless, and so is our appetite to master it.

Nature programmed the neurobiological processes of early love to appear as something beyond the primitive sexual cravings of the genitals. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, it all leads to copulation and reproduction, but from the perspective of the individual who has recently fallen head over heels in love with someone, it is mostly about a sensation of warmth and delight, and rarely of sexual nature.

People are like mussels. You can put them in a vat of boiling water, and some of them will pop open immediately. Some of them will have to float around in the water for a bit, then they’ll slowly release. Others never open up at all, no matter what sort of hot water they’re in.

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.

All men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.

You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

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.

There seems to be something in our human nature that draws us away from a life-giving relationship with Jesus because it feels more comfortable to focus on what to do and not do. That tendency robs us of real joy and peace.

Together you are a species that grows in all aspects of life – separated you are a mere speck of dust in vast ocean of space-time capable of nothing progressive.

I speak of the human heart, not a logic puzzle." -Diego de Gama

Forgive and forget is the divine ideal. Grappling with the hurt while biting your tongue and struggling to refuse justifiable vengeance―that's closer to human reality.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

The most painful emotions are better than none at all. Ironically, we make you human.

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.

When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.That’s human action on the outside world.We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;And the sun is always punctual every day.(5/7/14)

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures.

There are people among us who are biologically human but who are androids in the metaphoric sense.

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There's only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other's guts.

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.

Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...

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

Humans are beasts, until tamed.

If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.

Pessimism is a funny thing, isn't it? Madison thought as she looked at Judith's furrowed face. I like a bit of pessimism as much as the next man, but when I'm bombarded with it I suddenly became an eternal optimist.

It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.

If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.

Islamophobia defines whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.

i sometimes think i'm too in love with alone. who could i love more than this peace?

We must not bind our hearts to the things of the world, no matter how beautiful they are or how much pleasure they give us. Our hearts must soar in the heavens for us to be truly the humans we were meant to be.

An anti-hero is just a villain you spend a lot of time with.

The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead.

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls.

It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self.

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".

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.

Nature to all things fixed the limits fitAnd wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.As on the land while here the ocean gains.In other parts it leaves wide sandy plainsThus in the soul while memory prevails,The solid power of understanding failsWhere beams of warm imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt awayOne science only will one genius fit,So vast is art, so narrow human witNot only bounded to peculiar arts,But oft in those confined to single partsLike kings, we lose the conquests gained before,By vain ambition still to make them moreEach might his several province well command,Would all but stoop to what they understand.

[There's] one... thing I can tell you about human nature: beautiful people are the last ones you want to befriend. Beautiful people float through life thinking that it's perfectly normal for others to gaze at them adoringly, and open doors for them, and defer to their opinion... Doesn't anyone understand that beautiful people are stupid? That's why nature made them beautiful, so they'd have a chance at surviving in the wild. And how do they survive? They use people and then they drop people, and they float away on the currents of their own gorgeousness to the next poor girl who thinks that being friends with a beutiful person will somehow make her beautiful, too. I've got news for you: Hanging around beautiful people just makes you uglier by comparison.

Humans. We are intelligent. We are destructive. We are complex creatures.

through the rose glass window in their beautiful new home, you stare at the love you gave away.

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained inall respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold aRealistic Vision of human nature.

The embrace of essential beastliness, made scientific and respectable by a reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions, thrilled and enthralled Western thought in certain quarters and in fact still does enthrall persons and groups that experience live in society as a barely tolerable constraint on a kind of freedom they consider a birthright. This freedom appears to have most of the essential features of a war of each against all, whether a hot war that compels them to go armed to Starbucks or to church or a cold war that makes a virtue of craftiness and guile, the ability to loot and wreck the national economy without getting caught.

Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

But before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.

Your blessings are very important to melt down the stony hearts.

You really are a chameleon, aren't you? Fitting in wherever you go."Aren't we all?" she said...

Social hierarchy doesn’t hold a candle to the power of feeling isolated in your own skin.

Don't judge people by their religious, cultural, or professional background. Judge if you must, by their behavior with other people.

Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.

The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.

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.

We are animals and as animals we kill to survive. Unfortunately some of us are monsters and kill just because they can.

All humans are rogues. Cured only by death.

The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.

You live in a society, that always demands you to have a label to define yourself. Now it's up to you, whether you choose man-made labels like 'religious' and 'atheist', or your innate natural label gifted by Mother Nature, i.e. 'human'.