Human Nature Quotes

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.

Flattery is false money, which would not be current were it not for our vanity.

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it's like a battery: you've got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Everybody stumbles across a golden opportunity at least once in a lifetime. Unfortunately most people just pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and walk away from it.

Don't allow your animal nature to rule your reason.

The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.

The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath.

I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.

We all fear what we don't know - it's natural.

Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time in the form of legislation and customs.

I have not observed mens honesty to increase with their riches.

Man is the highest being in creation, because he attains to freedom.

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.

It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.

Those who don't build must burn.

It is more often from pride than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last.

Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.

We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.

Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

Much Virtue in Herbs, little in Men.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.

By the delusions of seeming good the people are often misled to desire their own ruin; and they are frequently influenced by great hopes and brave promises.

And truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and wish to do it anyway, here lies the error and the blame.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; asbad and good.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Those who show pity and are always ready to help during times of trouble are seldom the same ones who rejoice in our joy: when others are happy they have nothing to do, they become superfluous and lose their feeling of superiority, and so they easily show their displeasure.

The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves;such as we see in the sexual attraction.

Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.

We judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intensions.

When fear is excessive it can make many a man despair.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

It is man's social nature which distinguishes him from the brute creation. If it is his privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter-dependent. Only an arrogant man will claim to be independent of everybody else and be self-contained.

If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

The strongest symptom of wisdom in man is his being sensible of his own follies.

The more virtuous any man is, the less easily does he suspect others to be vicious.

Enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.

Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.