Human Nature Quotes

Blame is safer than praise

If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer

The best of us would rather be popular than right.

When you fight something long enough, it becomes a center pole right in your life and you count on it to be there to fight with.

Dignity of human nature requires that we must face the storms of life.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.

We count the courtesies accorded us by unpopular people as offenses.

When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.

Bullies are always cowards.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

All dogs look up to you. All cats look down on you. Only the pig looks at you as an equal

Every man knows the smell of his own fart.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have re- belled long ago! There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start allover again!

Men are so stupid and concerned with their present needs, they will always let themselves be deceived.

In solitude there grows what anyone brings into it, the inner beast too. Therefore solitude is inadvisable to many.

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.

He who runs may see that opium and such other intoxicants and narcotics stupefy a man's soul and reduce him to a level lower than that of beasts.

He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.

It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.

Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

That which occasions so many mistakes in the computations of men, when they expect return for favors, is that the giver's pride and the receiver's cannot agree upon the value of the kindness done.

There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.

Gratitude, in most men, is only a strong and secret hope of greater favors.

I think people - what people want to do is make [economy] get worse.

It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another.

I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.

In morality, man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity.

Our good qualities expose us more to hatred and persecution than all the ill we do.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Without my attempts in natural science, I should never have learned to know mankind such as it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure contemplation and thought, so closely observe the errors of the senses and of the understanding, the weak and strong points of character.

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.

For as there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists, or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world.

Never forget that a man is made great and perfect as much by his faults as by his virtues. So we must not seek to rob a nation of its character, even if it could be proved that the character was all faults.

Almost every man we meet requires some civility; requires to be humored; - he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

Men are more ready to offend one who desires to be beloved than one who wishes to be feared.

In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it.

Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.

Watch a man at play for an hour and you can learn more about him than in talking to him for a year.

Humility is often a false front we employ to gain power over others.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.