Human Nature famous quotes
03-24-2025
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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
-- A. S. Byatt -
We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.
-- Abraham Maslow -
Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.
-- Abraham Maslow -
But this Christ or Redeemer took not upon him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham, that is, human nature, that in the nature which sinned he might make the expiation required.
-- Adam Clarke -
But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.
-- Agatha Christie -
Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.
-- Ai Weiwei -
It is just human nature to take time to connect the dots, I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.
-- Al Gore -
I'm naturally an optimist, but my basis for hope is rooted in my understanding of human nature.
-- Al Gore -
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.
-- Alan Watts -
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
-- Alan Watts -
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
-- Albert Camus -
The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
-- Albert Camus -
The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.
-- Aldous Huxley -
A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
These are not vague inferences . . . but they are solid conclusions drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
That experience is the parent of wisdom is an adage the truth of which is recognized by the wisest as well as the simplest of mankind.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
When men, engaged in unjustifiable pursuits, are aware that obstructions may come from a quarter which bare apprehension of opposition from doing what they would with eagerness rush into if no such external impediments were to be feared.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Happy will it be for ourselves, and most honorable for human nature, if we have wisdom and virtue enough to set so glorious an example to mankind!
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Take mankind in general, they are vicious-their passions may be operated upon.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Has it not. . . invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice?
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
It is a general principle of human nature, that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it...
-- Alexander Hamilton -
What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!
-- Alexander Herzen -
Modern reality TV sets up these competitive situations to show us real human nature.
-- Alexander Ludwig -
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Human consciousness becomes a terrible gift which challenges the power that gave it.
-- Alison Jolly -
Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There's no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.
-- Angelina Jolie -
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
-- Annie Dillard -
Satanism advocates practicing a modified form of the Golden Rule. Our interpretation of this rule is: "Do unto others as they do unto you"; because if you "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and they, in turn, treat you badly, it goes against human nature to continue to treat them with consideration. You should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but if your courtesy is not returned, they should be treated with the wrath they deserve.
-- Anton Szandor LaVey -
Art is a product of nature in general, in the particular form of human nature.
-- Anton Webern -
Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.
-- Aristotle -
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.
-- Arnold Bennett -
If you laid all our laws end to end, there would be no end.
-- Arthur Baer -
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
-- Arundhati Roy -
What the multitude says, is so, or soon will be so.
-- Baltasar Gracian -
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
The evil is not that you cannot change human nature. The evil is that human nature cannot change you.
-- Barrows Dunham -
It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well.
-- Baruch Spinoza -
Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.
-- Ben Whishaw -
Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?
-- Benjamin Franklin -
There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
-- Benjamin Haydon -
Christ is God clothed with human nature.
-- Benjamin Whichcote -
You can't repeal human nature by an Act of Congress.
-- Bernard Baruch -
Human nature means that institutions at some point lose their sense of mission. That sense of vulnerability drives Pimco.
-- Bill Gross -
Eell there always is a tendency in human nature to deify.
-- Bill Maher -
You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
-- Billie Holiday -
Man has no ability to repair this damaged planet. The flaw in human nature is too great. God is our only hope!
-- Billy Graham -
Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all
-- Carlos Castaneda -
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.
-- Carol S. Dweck -
I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.
-- Cass Sunstein -
We live by encouragement and die without it - slowly, sadly and angrily.
-- Celeste Holm -
Cheerfulness is full of significance: it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature.
-- Charles Kingsley -
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.
-- Charles Lamb -
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
One of the things I believe in is a sense of human nature.
-- Chris Hondros -
So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason - to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?
-- Christina Baker Kline -
In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered.
-- Clifford Allbutt -
Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.
-- Clinton D. McKinnon -
Sincerity and truth are the basis of every virtue.
-- Confucius -
The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.
-- Confucius -
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living.
-- Dale Carnegie -
People who have expertise just love to share it. That's human nature.
-- David Baldacci -
Before there can be wonders, there must be wonder.
-- David Copperfield -
It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door.
-- David Hackworth -
The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
-- David McCullough -
Human nature is divided; it contains both darkness and light. You can choose to accept the darkness and lament it, or you can choose to expand the light until the darkness no longer dominates.
-- Deepak Chopra -
When the gunman realizes that nobody else is armed, he will lay down his weapons and turn himself in ... that's just human nature.
-- Dianne Feinstein -
The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without bieng frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of wierd theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott -
Nature pulls one way and human nature another.
-- E. M. Forster -
Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
-- E. O. Wilson -
Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs -
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
-- Edith Hamilton -
Gambling is a principle inherent in human nature.
-- Edmund Burke -
The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
-- Edward Abbey -
If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.
-- Edward Hoagland -
If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.
-- Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon -
I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more.
-- Edward Noyes Westcott -
The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin -
It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
-- Eleanor Catton -
I actually think that secrets are just a part of human nature and that everybody should have some.
-- Elizabeth Banks -
... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.
-- Ellen Willis -
It's human nature to gripe, but I'm going ahead and doing the best I can.
-- Elvis Presley -
Everybody comes from the same source. If you hate another human being, you're hating part of yourself.
-- Elvis Presley -
As the world community develops in peace, it will open up great untapped reservoirs in human nature.
-- Emily Greene Balch -
It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: ***** and cafés.
-- Eric Weiner -
Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever,
-- Evgeny Morozov -
It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.
-- Frank B. Kellogg -
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
We fail to reckon with the reality of human nature. By nature,we are egocentric. Our world revolves around us. None of us is totally altruistic.
-- Gary Chapman
