2,272 Quotes About Human-nature

How often have we rather eagerly chosen the dark because the nature of it grants us the ability to be blind to the nature of ourselves. And while the choice of the darkness might hide our nature, it certainly reveals how ashamed we are of it.

The devil did not need to work at all when people were so willing to do his dirty work for him.

The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.

Yesterday's truth made people religious, today's truth makes people atheist, tomorrow's truth will take people beyond both religion and atheism into the land of all-accepting humanness.

There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

...two chimpanzees were observed maltreating a chicken: One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but soon allow itself to approach once again--and be beaten once again. Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and cruelty.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

He taught me something that my extended formal education could not: that in some ancient part of my soul there still lived a wolf. Sometimes it is necessary to let the wolf in us speak: to silence the incessant chattering of the ape.

The intelligentsia have largely ignored or downplayed the things in which Americans lead the world—including philanthropy, technology, and the creation of life-saving medicines—and treated the errors, flaws and shortcomings that Americans share with human beings around the world as special defects of “our society.