Human Nature Quotes

After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.

~ Victor Hugo

Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature.

~ Nocturnus Libertus

Hopefully, someday we will both realize that despite our sharp differences, you and I have more in common than we think.

~ Ray Bourhis

The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary

~ Robert Greene

...suddenly I got shivers down my spine thinking about how many different people one and the same person can be.

~ Janne Teller

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.

~ Arundhati Roy

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

~ Philip K. Dick

People are attracted more towards bad things because being good has been turned into a boring duty. No adrenaline & dopamine rush, no rewards!

~ Saurabh Sharma

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

~ Philip Roth

We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.

~ Iain M. Banks

Books are only half our job , the other half is human nature.

~ Mary Virginia Provines

Do not be dismayed to learn there is a bit of the devil in you. There is a bit of the devil in us all.

~ Arthur Byron Cover

I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.

~ Thomas Howard

Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to itself

~ John Jakes

Improvement is always on the schedule for tomorrow. Change is always taking place some time in the future. It’s human nature.

~ Dan Pearce

...there is something demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering.

~ Adam Nevill

The illusion that humans possess free will is compounded by the inherent randomness of the universe. Chaos disguised as freedom of choice...

~ Henry Lindell

Mr. Cat and Mr. Dog were neighbors who fought like, well, cats and dogs. That is until Mr. Rat moved in. It's fascinating how easily two enemies ally at the introduction of a third.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Nature is infinitely rich and diverse in her ways. She can be seen to break her most unchanging laws. She has made self-interest the motive of all human action, but in the great host of men she produces ones who are strangely constituted, in whom selfishness is scarcely perceptible because they do not place their affections in themselves. Some are passionate about the sciences, others about the public good. They are as attached to the discoveries of others as if they themselves had made them, or to the institutions of public welfare and the state as if they derived benefit from them. This habit of not thinking of themselves influences the whole course of their lives. They don't know how to use other men for their profit. Fortune offers them opportunities which they do not think of taking up.In nearly all men the self is almost never inactive. You will detect their self-interest in nearly all the advice they give you, in the services they do for you, in the contacts they make, in the friendships they form. They are deeply attached to the things which affect their interests however remotely, and are indifferent to all others. When they encounter a man who is indifferent to personal interest they cannot understand him. They suspect him of hidden motives, of affectation, or of insanity. They cast him from their bosom, revile him.

~ Jan Potocki

Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.

~ Lynda Williams

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.

~ Bram Stoker

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

~ John Von Neumann

I like a look of agony, because I know it's true

~ Emily Dickinson

...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.

~ Dianna Hardy

Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.

~ Josephine Tey

A snake must be treated as a snake, forgiving it every time it showed you its fangs, will not transform into a garland of flowers.

~ Himmilicious

Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience

~ Isaac Asimov

The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age — unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.

~ Josef Pieper

No doubt, humans will do a lot of damage before we ultimately destroy ourselves. But life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after this human experiment is over.

~ Zeena Schreck

Men are not angels,” Akhmar affirmed. “And so men have the chance to be noble, in a way that angels cannot.

~ J. Leigh Bralick

He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines

~ Mary Maclane

Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there where we didn't expect it. WHACK! So, we whack that mole. Oops! We're so smart that we're a menace.

~ Robert Buettner

It wasn’t human nature to leave things alone. It was normal for people to try to fix things that didn’t need to be fixed; or, infinitely worse, trying to fix things that were broken, because some things are meant to be broken--

~ Tom Upton

Of course he despised the world as a whole, every thoughtful man should, it is almost a test of refinement.

~ E.m. Forster

Free will isn’t always about choice, often weakness plays the game

~ Jeyn Roberts

People started down the road with good intentions, but the moment the road became rough or difficult, they'd abandon it.

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes naturally to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.

~ Christopher Ryan

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.

~ Neal Shusterman